Title: Fifty Orwell Essays
Author: George Orwell
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0300011h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: August 2003
Most recent update: December 2015
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THE SPIKE

It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one
woman, lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too
tired to talk much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with
home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead
the chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that
great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky.
Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff. We defiled
the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was
a devil, everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling,
blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn't call your soul your own
when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the middle
of the night for giving a back answer. When You, came to be
searched, he fair held you upside down and shook you. If you were
caught with tobacco there was bell to. Pay, and if you went in with
money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. 'For the love of Christ, mate,' the old
hands advised me, 'don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for
going into the spike with eightpence!'

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot
with a lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and
tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes,
and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in
our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks,
and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very
toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us
might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But is an
unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search
below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was
Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney
out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at
the wrong moment, and was impounded.

At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at
the gate entered our names and other particulars in the register
and took our bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the
workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly,
limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and
about a hundred narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us
at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and
searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty, who gave the
tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving
them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when
he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said:

'You are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so,' I said.

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck,
guv'nor,' he said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And
thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with compassion,
even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent
secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and
patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon
layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of
holes, held together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming
nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly,
sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the
bath, and washed only their 'toe-rags', the horrid, greasy little
clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three
minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller
towels had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and
we were dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like
nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent
into the dining-room, where supper was set out on the deal tables.
It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether
breakfast, dinner or supper–half a pound of bread, a bit of
margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five minutes to
gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us
with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for
the night. The doors were locked on the outside a little before
seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the next twelve
hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting
apparatus except a tiny, barred window high up in the wall, and a
spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and
straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on
a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up
coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hoping for
a sound night's rest. But I did not get it, for there is always
something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as
I discovered immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in
honour of the season–a little sacrifice to the gods of
spring, perhaps–the authorities had cut off the steam from
the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent
the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten
minutes and waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall
comfortably asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major
came marching down the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the
doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was
full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for
there was Only One tub full of water between us all in the morning,
and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps
had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum
on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the dining-room to
bolt our breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because
the military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices
overnight, so that it was as hard as ship's biscuit. But we were
glad of our tea after the cold, restless night. I do not know what
tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea.
It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all evils.
Without the half goon or so of it that they suck down a day, I
truly believe they could not face their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical
inspection, which is a precaution against smallpox. It was three
quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had time now
to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It was an
instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two
long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold,
lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless
he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we
looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat
feet, sagging muscles–every kind of malformation and physical
rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all
tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen
there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old 'Daddy', aged seventy-four,
with his truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted
starveling with sparse beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the
corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering
hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his
trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But few of us
were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built
men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in
hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the
week-end. As soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the
dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed,
stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal
boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high
up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set
of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted
himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an
elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o'clock in the
morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to
talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad
spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of
the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from
these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have
nothing worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly
leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with
them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot
think of anything except the next meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent,
his back bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on
to the floor. George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer
habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that
he had lost on the toad. Bill the moocher, the best built man of us
all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even after twelve
hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in
the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got
him seven days. William and, Fred, two young, ex-fishermen from
Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and
died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an imaginary toff,
who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden
sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities.
Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized,
and he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the
makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes
like schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major's step, for smoking
though connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary
room. It is hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to
think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than
hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of
being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine
an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a
dog in a barrel, only an educated man, who has consolations within
himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly
all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds.
Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of
occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper
about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them
to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their
lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from
boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the
Tramp Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the
spike, the job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not
really any work to be done there, and I was able to make off and
hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some
workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning
service. There was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing
cases to sit on, and back numbers of the FAMILY HERALD, and even a
copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse library. It was paradise after
the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one
of the biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a
meal twice in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told
me that they always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and
went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over the cook
set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food
that remained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef,
and bucketfuls of broad and vegetables, were pitched away like
rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins
to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow tramps
were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies
half filled with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea,
and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It
appeared that the food was thrown away from deliberate policy,
rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the
spike. The, boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now
unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp's only tobacco is
picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if
he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I
talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a
collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of
tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held
himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes,
too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his wanderings. He
told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger,
sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the
south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for
weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which
makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the
other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own
case–six months at the public charge for want of three
pounds' worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse
kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune
immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in
every English workman. Though he had been famished, along with the
rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown
away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite
severely.

'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too
pleasant you'd have all the scum of the country flocking into them.
It's only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps
are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong with them. You don't
want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.'

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not
listen. He kept repeating:

'You don't want to have any pity on these tramps–scum,
they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men
like you and me. They're scum, just scum.'

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself
from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in
the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body
might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure
aether of the middle classes.

The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We
were too bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and
reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock
for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the
hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold
mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock's hands stood
at four, and supper was not till six, and there was nothing left
remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his
assistant arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like
lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment.
The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable;
it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little
impression on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a
man could finish his portion, hungry though most of us were. When
we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we
were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed
forth to squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our
ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could
riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities
have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The
doctor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o'clock
before we finally escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard.
How bright everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow,
after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man
his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of bread and
cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to
get out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our
interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of wasted time we
had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads
for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to
make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next
spike, where the game would begin anew.

I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a
respectable, downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots
and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were
scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress.
Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp
Major had to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were
no cars passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great
wax candles. Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was
hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed with
that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The
others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on
the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm.
It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a
rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man
who is repaying an obligation.

'Here y'are, mate,' he said cordially. 'I owe you some fag ends.
You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box
of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves
another–here y'are.'

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into
my hand.

A HANGING (1931)

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light,
like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail
yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds
fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell
measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for
a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown
silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets
draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged
within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a
puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He
had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body,
rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall
Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the
gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while
the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and
fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides.
They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him
in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him
to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is
still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite
unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he
hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the
wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of
the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily
prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound.
He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff
voice. "For God's sake hurry up, Francis," he said irritably. "The
man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready
yet?"

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side
of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched
close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at
once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and
the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards,
the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A
dreadful thing had happened–a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a
loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body,
wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a
large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it
pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had
made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his
face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the
dog.

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the
dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking
everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a
handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged
the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail
wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on
incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging.
It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog.
Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once
more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare
brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked
clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing
gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step
his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp
danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel.
And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he
stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it
means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner
step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable
wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This
man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the
organs of his body were working–bowels digesting food, skin
renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming–all toiling
away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he
stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth
of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey
walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw,
reasoned–reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party
of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding
the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us
would be gone–one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main
grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It
was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on
top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope
dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform
of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a
servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two
warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led,
half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the
ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the
prisoner's neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a
rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed,
the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated
cry of "Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!", not urgent and fearful like a prayer
or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling
of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman,
still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a
flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner's face. But the sound,
muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: "Ram!
Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!"

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever.
Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the
prisoner went on and on, "Ram! Ram! Ram!" never faltering for an
instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly
poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the
cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number–fifty, perhaps,
or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone
grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering.
We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to
his cries–each cry another second of life; the same thought
was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his
head he made a swift motion with his stick. "Chalo!" he shouted
almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner
had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the
dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but
when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into
a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking
timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the
prisoner's body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight
downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare
body; it oscillated, slightly. "HE'S all right," said the
superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out
a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite
suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. "Eight minutes past eight.
Well, that's all for this morning, thank God."

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered
and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We
walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their
waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The
convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were
already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each
man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched
round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene,
after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the
job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to
snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had
come, with a knowing smile: "Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant
the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he
pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright.–Kindly take one
of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir?
From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European
style."

Several people laughed–at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously.
"Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness.
It wass all finished–flick! like that. It iss not always
so–oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged
to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure
decease. Most disagreeable!"

"Wriggling about, eh? That's bad," said the superintendent.

"Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I
recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him
out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to
dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. 'My
dear fellow,' we said, 'think of all the pain and trouble you are
causing to us!' But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very
troublesome!"

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing.
Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. "You'd better
all come out and have a drink," he said quite genially. "I've got a
bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it."

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the
road. "Pulling at his legs!" exclaimed a Burmese magistrate
suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing
again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily
funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike,
quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop–so easily
pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where
charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios–the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of
really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting
stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a
good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner
than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over
cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking
for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be
a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.
For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a
very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read
such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a
copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's
name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had
a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of
pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the
decayed person smelling of old bread-crusts who comes every day,
sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless
books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books
for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop
we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order
them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away
later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came
back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They
would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make
us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would
vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were
unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner
about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how
they had happened to come out of doors without any
money–stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves
believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not
quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to
gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few
places where you can hang about for a long time without spending
any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a
glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and
aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an
obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and
then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of
them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying
for them; merely to order them was enough–it gave them, I
suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We
sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also
stamps–used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange,
silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex;
women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits
of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes
compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese
earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of
them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and
told us how 'true' their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any
horoscope seems 'true' if it tells you that you are highly
attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.)
We did a good deal of business in children's books, chiefly
'remainders'. Modern books for children are rather horrible things,
especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner
give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even
Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later
imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days
struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome
things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to
interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian
sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms
used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: '2 doz.
Infant Jesus with rabbits'.

But our principal sideline was a lending library–the usual
'twopenny no-deposit' library of five or six hundred volumes, all
fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the
easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for
twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a
shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them
better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose
about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding
a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and
Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to
bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair
cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth
noting that of all the authors in our library the one who 'went
out' the best was–Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse?
No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey
Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read
solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one
might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of
tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is
true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid.
Roughly speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel–the
ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of
the English novel–seems to exist only for women. Men read
either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.
But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our
subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories
every week for over a year, besides others which he got from
another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read
the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent
of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover
nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his
memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could
tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had 'had it
already'.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their
pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely
the 'classical' English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is
simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope,
etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At
the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, 'Oh, but
that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy
to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare.
Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to'
read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand.
People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr
Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses
was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the 'back parts' of the
Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing
unpopularity of American books. And another–the publishers
get into a stew about this every two or three years–is the
unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the
librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying
'I don't want short stories', or 'I do not desire little stories',
as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why,
they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new
set of characters with every story; they like to 'get into' a novel
which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I
believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the
readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are
utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The
short stories which are stories are popular enough, VIDE D. H.
Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller DE MÉTIER? On the
whole–in spite of my employer's kindness to me, and some
happy days I spent in the shop–no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated
person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a
bookshop. Unless one goes in for 'rare' books it is not a difficult
trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know
anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You
can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where
they advertise their wants. If you don't see an ad. for Boswell's
DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one for THE MILL ON THE
FLOSS by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not
capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines
can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence
as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of
work are very long–I was only a part-time employee, but my
employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant
expeditions out of hours to buy books–and it is an unhealthy
life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if
it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives
on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any
other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the
place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book
trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A
bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a
distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly
dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I
really did love books–loved the sight and smell and feel of
them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old.
Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a
shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about
the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of
collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers,
odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies' magazines
of the sixties. For casual reading–in your bath, for
instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or
in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch–there is nothing
to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I
went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the
mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even
slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if
it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy
junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It
is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and
dead bluebottles.

SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of
people–the only time in my life that I have been important
enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police
officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way
anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise
a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone
somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a
police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the
football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other
way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more
than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that
met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe
distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were
the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town
and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on
street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had
already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the
sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
Theoretically–and secretly, of course–I was all for the
Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the
job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make
clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of
the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the
scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with
bamboos–all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of
guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter
silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not
even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know
that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are
going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited
little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of
my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as
something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM, upon the will of
prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest
joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist
priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him
off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was
enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a
better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of
imperialism–the real motives for which despotic governments
act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the
other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an
elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to
see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I
took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an
elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful IN TERROREM.
Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the
elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a
tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up, as tame
elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the
previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the
only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set
out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now
twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had
suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no
weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already
destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal
rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels,
had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were
waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It
was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts,
thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of
the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant
had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information.
That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds
clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of
events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the
elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I
had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies,
when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an
old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut,
violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women
followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there
was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded
the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an
Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not
have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had
come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with
its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth.
This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had
scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was
lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to
one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the
teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony.
(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of
the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great
beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one
skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to
a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already
sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw
me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five
cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that
the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred
yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population
of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had
seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to
shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the
elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was
different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to
them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the
meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the
elephant–I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if
necessary–and it is always unnerving to have a crowd
following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool,
with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the
huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of
paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy
from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was
standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He
took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was
tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to
clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew
with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a
serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable
to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and
obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And
at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more
dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would
merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and
caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I
decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that
he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had
followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and
growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on
either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all
certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching
me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They
did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me
and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills
pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I
stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the
hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the
unarmed native crowd–seemingly the leading actor of the
piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro
by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this
moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom
that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his
rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the
"natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
"natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit
it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to
doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a
sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do
definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two
thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly
away, having done nothing–no, that was impossible. The crowd
would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the
East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating
his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied
grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it
would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about
killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted
to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a LARGE animal.)
Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the
elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only
be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had
got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans
who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant
had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice
of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too
close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk
up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his
behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me,
it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also
I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with
a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at
every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have
about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then
I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the
watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would
have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in
front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The
sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two
thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and
reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if
that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh.
That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the
magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd
grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see
the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable
throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The
rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did
not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut
an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought,
therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight
at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this,
thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the
kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard
the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that
instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over
the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his
body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely
old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him
without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long
time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he
sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous
senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined
him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At
the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate
slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging
and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did
for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and
knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he
seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath
him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk
reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only
time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash
that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the
mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but
he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long
rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open–I could see far down into
caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die,
but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining
shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick
blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die.
His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured
breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and
in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a
bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an
end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great
beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and
not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle
and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They
seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as
steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I
heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were
bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they
had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the
shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an
Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right
thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its
owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn
shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an
elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And
afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put
me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for
shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER")

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more
completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The
machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines,
are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the
metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in
importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of
caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy
is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is
extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and are
willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to
the coal face when the 'fillers' are at work. This is not easy,
because when the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are
not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible to
come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for
instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there is
when the machines are roaring and the air is black with coal dust,
and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those
times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental
picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if
there–heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above
all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for
there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps
and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal
dust.

When you have finally got there–and getting there is a in
itself: I will explain that in a moment–you crawl through the
last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall
three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the
smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut;
underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is
only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more
than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything
else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor
belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because
the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can
see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one
to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen
coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are
feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple
of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a
glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is
carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to
some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding
half a tun, and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the
outer air.

It is impossible to watch the 'fillers' at work without feeling
a pang of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they
do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person.
For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they
are also doing, it in a position that doubles or trebles the work.
They have got to remain kneeling all the while–they could
hardly rise from their knees without hitting the ceiling–and
you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this
means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are standing up,
because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the shovel along;
kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your arm and
belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make things
easier. There is the heat–it varies, but in some mines it is
suffocating–and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and
nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle
of the conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like
the rattle of a machine gun. But the fillers look and work as
though they were made of iron. They really do look like iron
hammered iron statues–under the smooth coat of coal dust
which clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see
miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men,
they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in
that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide
shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced
buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh
anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin
drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the
clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them
whether they are young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or
even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all look
alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man's body,
and a figure fit for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of
extra flesh on the waist-line, and the constant bending would be
impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen
it–the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over,
driving their, huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force
and speed. They are on the job for seven and a half hours,
theoretically without a break, for there is no time 'off'. Actually
they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the
shift to eat the food they have brought with them, usually a hunk
of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first time I
was watching the 'fillers' at work I put my hand upon some dreadful
slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco.
Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good
against thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can
get much grasp of the processes that are going on round you. This
is chiefly because the mere effort of getting from place to place;
makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even
disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You
get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a
telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten men, but
they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand
upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working
the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual
momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the cars,
but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom,
when the cage slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is
going upwards again. In the middle of the run the cage probably
touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it touches
even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four
hundred yards underground. That is to say you have a
tolerable-sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid
rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing
things, green grass and cows grazing on it–all this suspended
over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the
calf of your leg. But because of the speed at which the cage has
brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you have
travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at
the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal
distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been
down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the
cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had
not realized that before he even gets to work he may have had to
creep along passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford
Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere
near a seam of coal; But as that seam is worked out and fresh seams
are followed up, the workings get further and further from the pit
bottom. If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal face, that
is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal
one; there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as
five miles. But these distances bear no relation to distances above
ground. For in all that mile or three miles as it may be, there is
hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places even
there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few
hundred yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit
gallery, eight or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls
built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire.
Every yard or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and
girders; some of the girders have buckled into fantastic curves
under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot–thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some
mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also
there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway
track with sleepers a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk
on. Everything is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery
smell which seems to be the same in all mines. You see mysterious
machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles of tools
slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the
beam of the lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in
mines where there are or have been horses. It would be interesting
to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by falling
down the shaft–for they say a mouse can fall any distance
uninjured, owing to its surface area being so large relative to its
weight. You press yourself against the wall to make way for lines
of tubs jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel
cable operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains
and thick wooden doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce
blasts of air. These doors are an important part of the ventilation
system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of
fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if
left to itself the air will take the shortest way round, leaving
the deeper workings unventilated; so all the short cuts have to be
partitioned off.

At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke
that soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall,
but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for
anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend
double, you have also got to keep your head up all the while so as
to see the beams and girders and dodge them when they come. You
have, therefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is nothing
to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes
(I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder
whether you will ever get to the end–still more, how on earth
you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You
come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all
exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in a
squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a
mysterious height–scene of and old fall of rock,
probably–and for twenty whole yards you can stand upright.
The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is another low
stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a
relief after the squatting business. But when you come to the end
of the beams and try to get up again, you find that your knees have
temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt,
ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a minute or
two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your
muscles are not the same as his. 'Only another four hundred yards,'
he says encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another
four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the
coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour;
a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes. Having
got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your
strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the
work in progress with any kind of intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are
already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is
slightly uphill. You get through the low places at the speed of a
tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt when your
knees give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance
and probably when you stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a
Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes more and more of
an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try walking head
down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the
miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in
very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most
of the miners have what they call 'buttons down the
back'–that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the
track is down hill the miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are
hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide down. In
mines where the 'travelling' is very bad all the miners carry
sticks about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the
handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of the stick and
in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These
sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets–a
comparatively recent invention–are a godsend. They look like
a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are made of some kind of
pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent
blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to
the surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and
travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted than you would be
by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your
thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult
feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner,
without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness
of your walk and chaff you about it. ('How'd ta like to work down
pit, eh?' etc.) Yet even a miner who has been long away front
work–from illness, for instance–when he comes back to
the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been
down an old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are
old-fashioned) and actually gone as far as the coal face, is likely
to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this. Here is this
frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal
person is a hard day's work in itself; and it is not part of the
miner's work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man's
daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and
sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage
work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal
face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people
other than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the
kind of point that one is always liable to miss. When you think of
the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures
hacking at walls of coal; you don't think, necessarily, of those
miles of creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also.
A miner's working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound
very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour a day
for 'travelling', more often two hours and sometimes three. Of
course, the 'travelling' is not technically work and the miner is
not paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It
is easy to say that miners don't mind all this. Certainly, it is
not the same for them as it would be for you or me. They have done
it since childhood, they have the right muscles hardened, and they
can move to and fro underground with a startling and rather
horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long
swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the
workings you see them on all fours, skipping round the pit props
almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to think that they
enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they all
admit that the 'travelling' is hard work; in any case when you hear
them discussing a pit among themselves the 'travelling' is always
one of the things they discuss. It is said that a shift always
returns from work faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all
say that it is the coming away after a hard day's work, that is
especially irksome. It is part of their work and they are equal to
it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to
climbing a smallish mountain before and after your day's work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get
some grasp of the processes that are going on underground. (I ought
to say, by the way, that I know nothing whatever about the
technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I have seen.)
Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that
essentially the process of getting it out is like scooping the
central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old days the miners
used to cut straight into the coal with pick and crowbar–a
very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state, is
almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an
electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of
vertically, with teeth a couple of inches long and half an inch or
an inch thick. It can move backwards or forwards on its own power,
and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever
heard, and sends forth clouds of coal dust which make it impossible
to see more than two to three feet and almost impossible to
breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting into the
base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet or
five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to
extract the coal to the depth to which it has been undermined.
Where it is 'difficult getting', however, it has also to be
loosened with explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a
rather small version of the drills used in street-mending, bores
holes at intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it
with clay, goes round the corner if there is one handy (he is
supposed to retire to twenty-five yards distance) and touches off
the charge with an electric current. This is not intended to bring
the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the
charge is too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal out
but brings the roof down as well.

After the blasting has been done the 'fillers' can tumble the
coal out, break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It
comes out first in monstrous boulders which may weigh anything up
to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the
tubs are shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly
revolving steel cable which drags them to the cage. Then they are
hoisted, and at the surface the coal is sorted by being run over
screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As far as possible the
'dirt'–the shale, that is–is used for making the roads
below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped;
hence the monstrous 'dirt-heaps', like hideous grey mountains,
which are the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the
coal has been extracted to the depth to which the machine has cut,
the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put in to
hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the
conveyor belt is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and
re-assembled. As far as possible the three operations of cutting,
blasting and extraction are done in three separate shifts, the
cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law,
not always kept, that forbids its being done when other men are
working near by), and the 'filling' in the morning shift, which
lasts from six in the morning until half past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably
only watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin
making a few calculations that you realize what a stupendous task
the 'fillers' are performing. Normally each o man has to clear a
space four or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal
to the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or
four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on to
the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal.
This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven
hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed
approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick
and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am
digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during
the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work
kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and
swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to
walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner's job would be as
much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze
or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please
God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work
that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable
road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm
hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I
become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what
different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is
a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life
without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even
prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary
counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from
eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to
writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly.
For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is
needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on
working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as
reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the
hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at
any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In
order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may
denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords,
that the poets may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be
forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know
that we 'must have coal', but we seldom or never remember what
coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a
fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather
jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and
shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only
very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect
this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just
'coal'–something that I have got to have; black stuff that
arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except
that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car
right across the north of England and never once remember that
hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking
at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your
car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the
daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than
they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in
their youth have worked underground, with the harness round their
waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all
fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even
when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be
produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we
should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal.
But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that
they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it
keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than
anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but
also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our
experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of
forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is
even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a
momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a
superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least
while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their
guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and
the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for
Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of our
lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with
their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with
arms and belly muscles of steel.

NORTH AND SOUTH (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER") (1937)

As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or
East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond
Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and
the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a
villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the South. It is
only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and
beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of
industrialism–an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that
you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so
planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the
earth, like the emptying of a giant's dust-bin. On the outskirts of
the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon
is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot
is mud and ashes and over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt
travel slowly across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on
fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding
this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur,
which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out
again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an
evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface.
One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a
choppy sea suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it is called
locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the
places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps
will still be distinguishable from an aeroplane.

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan.
All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north,
through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you
could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke.
The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud,
criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round,
as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the
'flashes'–pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the
hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly
cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber,
the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore
beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been
banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and
foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield.
Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest
town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be
pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make that claim for it.
It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent
buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred.
And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is
because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that
runs through the town is-usually bright yellow with some chemical
or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory
chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there
would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke.
One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste
ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a
squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of
grass and littered with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right
an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by
smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys,
chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze.
Behind me a railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In
front, across the patch of waste ground, a cubical building of red
and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas Grocock, Haulage
Contractor'.

At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses
and the blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a
kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are
rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze
themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys.
Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron
being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and
thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.
The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way. Right
in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of the street as
it were, are the 'pot banks'–conical brick chimneys like
gigantic burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their
smoke almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms
hundreds of feet across and almost as deep, with little rusty tubs
creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other workmen
clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the
cliff with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and
even the snow was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery
towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than
ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost
naked hills, and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the
distance.

When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two
questions that strike you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does
it matter?

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and
unavoidably ugly about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks
is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace
or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the architectural
tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly
because they happen to have been built at a time when modern
methods of steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and
when everyone was too busy making money to think about anything
else. They go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have
got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many of the
people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along
the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in
it. But since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and
in doing so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory
is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and belching
chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass,
and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at
the factories you pass as you travel out of London on the G.W.R.;
they may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly they are not ugly
in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any case, though
the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it
and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it
is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable,
industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise
itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a
dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not
like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in
the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not
ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a
stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives
and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint
and it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything
outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I
abominate it. The landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among
them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of nightmare,
afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to
write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about
the East the scenery is the real subject-matter.) It would probably
be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did,
from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine
Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the
beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil
lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is important to
remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that
industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite
apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country.
This is partly because of certain real differences which do exist,
but still more because of the North-South antithesis which has been
rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in England a
curious cult of Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A
Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know
that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will
explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that
the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that
the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by
rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is
grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner
is snobbish, effeminate, and lazy–that at any rate is the
theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first
time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man
venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the
Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for
loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result of tradition,
are not affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman five feet
four inches high and twenty-nine inches round the chest feels that
as an Englishman he is the physical superior of Camera (Camera
being a Dago), so also with the Northerner and the Southerner. I
remember a weedy little Yorkshireman, who would almost certainly
have run away if a fox-terrier had snapped at him, telling me that
in the South of England he felt 'like a wild invader'. But the cult
is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners
themselves. A year or two ago a friend of mine, brought up in the
South but now living in the North, was driving me through Suffolk
in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He glanced
disapprovingly at the cottages and said:

'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but
the Yorkshiremen are splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other
way about–beautiful villages and rotten people. All the
people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely
worthless.'

I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody
in that village. No, he did not know them; but because this was
East Anglia they were obviously worthless. Another friend of mine,
again a Southerner by birth, loses no opportunity of praising the
North to the detriment of the South. Here is an extract from one of
his letters to me:

I am in Clitheroe, Lanes...I think running water is much more
attractive in moor and mountain country than in the fat and
sluggish South. 'The smug and silver Trent,' Shakespeare says; and
the South–er the smugger, I say.

Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not
only are you and I and everyone else in the South of England
written off as 'fat and sluggish', but even water when it gets
north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes something
mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its
writer is an extremely intelligent man of 'advanced' opinions who
would have nothing but con-tempt for nationalism in its ordinary
form. Put to him some such proposition as 'One Britisher is worth
three foreigners', and he would repudiate it with horror. But when
it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to
generalize. All nationalistic distinctions–all claims to be
better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull
or speak a different dialect–are entirely spurious, but they
are important so long as people believe in them. There is no doubt
about the Englishman's inbred conviction that those who live to the
south of him are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed
by it to some extent. I think, therefore, that it is worth pointing
out when and why it came into being.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at
the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the
Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further
north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was
given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining
in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while
a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish
Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English
(actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at
least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly
Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good
than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines,
and vices' sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin
races. In the mythology of Garlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner
('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap
with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly,
cowardly, and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its
logical end, which would have meant assuming that the finest people
in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that
the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves.
Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has
so deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it
was the industrialization of the North that gave the North-South
antithesis its peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the
northern part of England was the backward and feudal part, and such
industry as existed was concentrated in London and the South-East.
In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money
versus feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the
South and East for the Parliament. But with the increasing use of
coal industry passed to the North, and there grew up a new type of
man, the self-made Northern business man–the Mr Rouncewell
and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his
hateful 'get on or get out' philosophy, was the dominant figure of
the nineteenth century, and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules
us still. This is the type edified by Arnold Bennett–the type
who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty thousand
pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an even greater boor after
he has made his money than before. On analysis his sole virtue
turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to admire
him because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant,
grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on'; in other words,
he knew how to make money.

This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the
Northern business man is no longer prosperous. But traditions are
not killed by facts, and the tradition of Northern' grit' lingers.
It is still dimly felt that a Northerner will 'get on', i.e. make
money, where a Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of
every Yorkshireman and every Scotchman who comes to London is a
sort of Dick Whittington picture of himself as the boy who starts
off by selling newspapers and ends up as Lord Mayor. And that,
really, is at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one can
make a great mistake is in imagining that this feeling extends to
the genuine working class. When I first went to Yorkshire, some
years ago, I imagined that I was going to a country of boors. I was
used to the London Yorkshireman with his interminable harangues and
his pride in the sup-posed raciness of his dialect (' "A stitch in
time saves nine", as we say in the West Riding'), and I expected to
meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I met with nothing of the
kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the Lancashire and
Yorkshire miners treated me with a kindness and courtesy that were
even embarrassing; for if there is one type of man to whom I do
feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed
any sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the
country. This has its importance when one remembers that the
English regional snobberies are nationalism in miniature; for it
suggests that place-snobbery is not a working-class
characteristic.

There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South,
and there is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern
England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards. For
climatic reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to
settle in the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably
go for months on end without once hearing an 'educated' accent,
whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where
you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace, the
bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is taking place
in the North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern
accents, for instance, persist strongly, while the Southern ones
are collapsing before the movies and the B.B.C. Hence your
'educated' accent stamps you rather as a foreigner than as a chunk
of the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes
it much easier to get into contact with the working class.

But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working
class? I shall have to discuss that later; I will only say here
that I do not think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier in
the North than it would be in the South to meet working-class
people on approximately equal terms. It is fairly easy to live in a
miner's house and be accepted as one of the family; with, say, a
farm labourer in the Southern counties it probably would be
impossible. I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid
idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a great deal in a
working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential point
is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by
contact with others which are not necessarily better but are
certainly different.

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A
working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but
the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that
deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a
millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person
goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is
generally due to the behaviour of his family–to the fact that
he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day
for failing to 'get on'. The fact that the working class know how
to combine and the middle class don't is probably due to their
different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an
effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of
strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her husband
on to blackleg and get the other fellow's job. Another
working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their
plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you
offer a working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he
doesn't want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid
giving offence. And again, take the working-class attitude towards
'education'. How different it is from ours, and how immensely
sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning
in others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see
through it and reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I
used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen
dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal
jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should
descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is
not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the
day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not
wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography.
To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are
nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of
a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a
week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform
and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a
working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel
Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real
life, looked back on his public school and university education and
found it a 'sickly, debilitating debauch'. There is much in
middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see
it from a working-class angle.

In a working-class home–I am not thinking at the moment of
the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes–you
breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so
easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is
in steady work and drawing good wages–an 'if which gets
bigger and bigger–has a better chance of being happy than an
'educated' man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a
sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a
working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings
after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits
in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing
finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the
children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog
lolls roasting himself on the rag mat–it is a good place to
be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of
it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes,
though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends
mainly upon one question–whether Father is in work. But
notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family
sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs
only to our own moment of time and could not belong either to the
future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian
future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the
things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there
is no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is hardly likely
that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes
to sit in shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'. And
there won't be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of
invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and
steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will
certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be
meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will
have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been
suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won't be so many
children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. But move
backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a world almost
equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in your
face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John', lice,
scurvy, a yearly child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the
priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering,
nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels
which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton
and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class
interiors–especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood
before the war, when England was still prosperous–that
reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.

SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than
any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in
spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and
crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is
the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the
left-wing papers, the NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with
their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the
British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that
the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan
Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the
Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some
kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the
Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes
to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the
thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For
some time past a reign of terror–forcible suppression of
political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless
espionage and mass imprisonment without trial–has been in
progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were
bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and
the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other
temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to
notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists
but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are
too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left.
And the people responsible for putting them there are those
dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his
galoshes–the Communists.

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the
poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain
thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between
revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are
vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and
the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away
from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet
caught up with the fact that Communism is now a
counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in
alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their
powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs
of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of
Communists assailed as wicked 'Reds' by right-wing intellectuals
who are in essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for
instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In
Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely
victorious. Of all that the Spanish workers won for themselves in
1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few collective farms and a
certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there
is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present
situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the
civil war.

Franco's bid for power differed from those of Hitler and
Mussolini in that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a
foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass backing, though
Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters,
apart from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning
aristocracy and the huge, parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of
this kind will array against it various forces which are not in
agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate
feudalism and clericalism; but so does the 'liberal' bourgeois, who
is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at
least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The 'liberal' bourgeois
is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop.
He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase 'la
carrière ouverte aux talents'. For clearly he has no chance
to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are
too poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes
to pay for bishops' vestments, and where every lucrative job is
given as a matter of course to the friend of the catamite of the
duke's illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant
reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the
worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting
side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front
(or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic
appeal, People's Front). It is a combination with about as much
vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads
or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the
Popular Front is bound to make itself felt. For even when the
worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they
are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for
bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he
understands the issue, for Socialism. And in the early days of the
revolution the Spanish workers understood the issue very well. In
the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content
themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns;
they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and
setting up the rough beginnings of a workers' government by means
of local committees, workers' militias, police forces, and so
forth. They made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the
active revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all
parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in nominal
control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every
subsequent Government had been of approximately the same
bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning this seemed not to
matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia, was almost
powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was
still happening when I reached Spain in December) to disguise
themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of
the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing
Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the
bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into
rich and poor reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every
move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed
towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out
of the many illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the
breaking-up of the old workers' militias, which were organized on a
genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the
same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the
substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon,
'People's Army'), modelled as far as possible on an ordinary
bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as
a military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for
military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted
purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In
every department the same policy has been followed, with the result
that only a year after the outbreak of war and revolution you get
what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State, with, in addition, a
reign of terror to preserve the status quo.

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle
could have taken place without foreign interference. But the
military weakness of the Government made this impossible. In the
face of France's foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to
Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup–plied by
Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my first three months in
Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary machine-gun), the
mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To
begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military
qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily Communist
but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist
prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the
only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not
only to get money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well.
Put in their crudest form, the terms were: 'Crush the revolution or
you get no more arms.' The reason usually given for the Russian
attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution,
the Franco-Soviet pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great
Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also, that the spectacle
of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure
has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this, even if true,
is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all countries can
be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the
Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they
control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all
their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of
counter-revolution.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real
struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has been between
revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though
anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more
anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak
of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or
wilfully dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk
of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution, because the
revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat
Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most
important to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary
propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no
relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and
comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if
England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even
earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to
increase–visibly is increasing–as more and more of the
capitalist class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their
game.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying
people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves
pretending–not in so many words, but by
implication–that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism.
Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration,
'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly
let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in
this form, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any
rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You
can oppose Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy, meaning capitalism. But
meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who
points out that Fascism and bourgeois 'democracy' are Tweedledum
and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an
impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the
issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is
not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the
moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too
closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to
shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor. More exactly,
you call him a Trotskyist.

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word–in Spain at
this moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there
indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a
Trotskyist–is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in
England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The word
'Trotskyist' (or 'Trotsky-Fascist') is generally used to mean a
disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to
split the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from
the fact that it means three separate things. It can mean one who,
like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the
actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate
use of the word); or the disguised Fascist already mentioned. The
three meanings can be telescoped one into the other at will.
Meaning No. 1 may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and
meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3.
Thus: 'XY has been heard to speak favourably of world revolution;
therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.' In Spain,
to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary
Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed
until a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in
the pay of Franco or Hitler.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case,
unless one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A
Fascist spy probably WOULD disguise himself as a revolutionary. In
Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the
Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist
or, at least, a traitor. At the beginning of the war the POUM, an
opposition Communist party roughly corresponding to the English
ILP., was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan
Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was
denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that
the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described
as 'working loyally' beside the Communists. Then the
Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the Government; then it
appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the
process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the
left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the left-wing Socialist
ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist press, is
already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and 'enemy of the people'.
And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in
which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every
dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a
régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the
fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco's
fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be
Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will
be called something different.

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been
against revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the
Russian aid, tended to produce greater military efficiency. If the
Anarchists saved the Government from August to October 1936, the
Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing
the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside
Spain, not outside). They made a militarized conscript army
possible, but they also made it necessary. It is significant that
as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had
practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by
enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and
it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large
preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany
and Italy decide to make off with the Spanish colonies and leave
Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a deadlock seems the likeliest
thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not
intend to lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright
victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven
into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too
obvious to need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can
only judge by the event, but I suspect that what the Government is
playing for is a compromise that would leave the war situation
essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one
will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war
may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain
divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones. Of
course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either
side, or by both.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely
commonplace in Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite
of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very
few people who have even heard of the enormous struggle that is
going on behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no
accident. There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy (I could
give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation from
being understood. People who ought to know better have lent
themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the
truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British
public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they
would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how
it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism
as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating
in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever.
And thus we are one step nearer to the great war 'against Fascism'
(cf. 1914, 'against militarism') which will allow Fascism, British
variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

MARRAKECH (1939)

As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a
cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes
later.

The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no
women–threaded their way across the market-place between the
piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short
chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that
the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely
wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the
shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the
burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump
the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy
earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no
identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge
waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a
month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are
buried.

When you walk through a town like this–two hundred
thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own
literally nothing except the rags they stand up in–when you
see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is
always difficult to believe that you are walking among human
beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.
The people have brown faces–besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have
names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff,
about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the
earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink
back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices
that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back
into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way
through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy
underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you
that you are walking over skeletons.

I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when
they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their
hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle I was
feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though
it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not
like me. It nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and
tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted again.
Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread
would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.

An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe
and sidled towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and
from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as
though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally
he said shyly in French:

"I could eat some of that bread."

I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret
place under his rags. This man is an employee of the
Municipality.

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of
what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish
rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted
areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have
ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good
deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless,
and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers,
like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is
generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long
black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark
fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at
lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand
and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime
of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At
his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler
parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody
noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark
holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them
old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a
cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the
booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping
in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole
packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more
or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the
same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers,
potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers,
tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters–whichever way you
look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are
thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres.
A good job Hitler isn't here. Perhaps he is on his way, however.
You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the
Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

"Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a
Jew. The Jews! They're the real rulers of this country, you know.
They've got all the money. They control the banks,
finance–everything."

"But," I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a
labourer working for about a penny an hour?"

"Ah, that's only for show! They're all money-lenders really.
They're cunning, the Jews."

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old
women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even
work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and
the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.
Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern
Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably
give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of
Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see
him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape
one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in
the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant
mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He
is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting
to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia
and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of
running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human
beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What
does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in
government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles,
palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One
could probably live here for years without noticing that for
nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless,
back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded
soil.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a
hare can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest
have turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like
broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with
frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women,
bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across
the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the
peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk
instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk.
The plough is a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one can easily
carry it on one's shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron
spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is
as much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to
plough with a cow and a donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would
not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand two cows would
cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions,
finally leaving it in rough furrows, after which the whole field
has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches, to conserve
water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is
never enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are
hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny
trickles which run through the subsoil.

Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road
outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are
mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems
to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children.
One day a poor old creature who could not have been more than four
feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her
and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was
partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point
of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be
violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it
is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on
donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the
baggage.

But what is strange about these people is their invisibility.
For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file
of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and
though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly
say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing–that was how I
saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind
them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my
attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to
bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet
I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I
noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The
Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries
a load which in the British army would be considered too much for a
fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off
its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that
it is the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master
like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen
years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master
tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out
before it is cold.

This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas–on the
whole–the plight of the human beings does not. I am not
commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are
next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its
galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if
one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.

As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching
southward–a long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries
and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding
up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron
wheels.

They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black
that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks
the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down
khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes
too small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They
slumped under the weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive
black faces were glistening with sweat.

As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my
eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look
you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not
even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which
actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This
wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been
dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in
garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white
skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and
he still believes it.

But there is one thought which every white man (and in this
connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a
Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How
much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they
turn their guns in the other direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought
stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other
onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the
white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we
all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know
it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see
the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing
peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over
them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of
paper.

BOYS' WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS'S REPLY (1940)

You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town
without coming upon a small newsagent's shop. The general
appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few
posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OF THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a
dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts and festooned from
floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny papers, most of them
with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.

Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these
shops hardly overlaps at all with that of the big news-agents.
Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the number and
variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and
pastime–cage-birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees,
carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess–has at
least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and
livestock-keeping must have at least a score between them. Then
there are the sporting papers, the radio papers, the children's
comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the large
range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less
exploiting women's legs, the various trade papers, the women's
story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG'S PAPER, etc. etc.), the
needlework papers–these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window–and in addition the
long series of 'Yank Mags' (FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN
SHORT STORIES, etc.), which are imported shop-soiled from America
and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And the periodical
proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS' FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS' OWN LIBRARY and
many others.

Probably the contents of these shops is the best available
indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and
thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in documentary
form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but
the novel is aimed almost exclusively at people above the
£4-a-week level. The movies are probably a very unsafe guide
to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a
monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at
all closely. The same applies to some extent to the daily papers,
and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the weekly
paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter.
Papers like the EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or
the ORACLE, or the PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist
because there is a definite demand for them, and they reflect the
minds of their readers as a great national daily with a circulation
of millions cannot possibly do.

Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys'
twopenny weeklies, often inaccurately described as 'penny
dreadfuls'. Falling strictly within this class there are at present
ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION, all
owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER,
HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What
the circulations of these papers are, I do not know. The editors
and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in any case the
circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to
fluctuate widely. But there is no question that the combined public
of the ten papers is a very large one. They are on sale in every
town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which
are much the oldest of these papers, are of rather different type
from the rest, and they have evidently lost some of their
popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and 'slow'. Nevertheless I want to discuss
them first, because they are more interesting psychologically than
the others, and also because the mere survival of such papers into
the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon.

The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one
paper frequently appear in the other), and were both started more
than thirty years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the
old B[oy's] O[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys,
and they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them
carries every week a fifteen–or twenty-thousand-word school
story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected with
the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school
story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the two
papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though
the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably
because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy.
Billy Bunter.

The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school
life, and the schools (Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim's in the
GEM) are represented as ancient and fashionable foundations of the
type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys
only appearing in very minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson
Lee, these boys continue week after week and year after year, never
growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years
the personnel has barely altered. All the principal characters in
both papers–Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny
Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them–were at Greyfriars or
St Jim's long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at
present, having much the same kind of adventures and talking almost
exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but the whole
atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged,
partly by means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the
Magnet are signed 'Frank Richards' and those in the GEM, 'Martin
Clifford', but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the
work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be
written in a style that is easily imitated–an extraordinary,
artificial, repetitive style, quite different from anything else
now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will do as
illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:

Groan!

'Shut up, Bunter!'

Groan!

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom
shut up, though often requested to do so. On the present awful
occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to
shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His
feelings, in fact, were inexpressible.

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered
sounds of woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter,
uttered enough for the whole party and a little over.

Harry Wharton & Go. stood in a wrathy and worried group.
They were landed and stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc.,
etc., etc.

Here is one from the Gem:

'Oh cwumbs!'

'Oh gum!'

'Oooogh!'

'Urrggh!'

Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and
pressed it to his damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for
breath. They looked at one another.

'Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy!' gurgled Arthur Augustus. 'I
have been thwown into quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahs! The
wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow!' etc., etc., etc.

Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find
something like them in almost every chapter of every number, to-day
or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that anyone would notice
is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be
compressed into about thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the
story, but actually playing its part in creating the atmosphere.
For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over
and over again; 'wrathy', for instance, is a great favourite, and
so is 'diddled, dished and done'. 'Oooogh!', 'Grooo!' and 'Yaroo!'
(stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so does 'Ha! ha!
ha!', always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of
a column or thereabouts consists of 'Ha! ha! ha!' The slang ('Go
and cat coke!', 'What the thump!', 'You frabjous ass!', etc. etc.)
has never been altered, so that the boys are now using slang which
is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various
nicknames are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines
we are reminded that Harry Wharton & Co. are 'the Famous Five',
Bunter is always 'the fat Owl' or 'the Owl of the Remove',
Vernon-Smith is always 'the Bounder of Greyfriars', Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy) is always 'the swell of St
Jim's', and so on and so forth. There is a constant, untiring
effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to
make Greyfriars and St Jim's into an extraordinary little world of
their own, a world which cannot be taken seriously by anyone over
fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped
'characters' has been built up, in several cases very successfully.
Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-known figures
in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he
ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of
characters in Dickens.

Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at
a real public school. They run in cycles of rather differing types,
but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type of story,
with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging
roasters, fights, canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly
recurring story is one in which a boy is accused of some misdeed
committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal the
truth. The 'good' boys are 'good' in the clean-living Englishman
tradition–they keep in hard training, wash behind their ears,
never hit below the belt etc., etc.,–and by way of contrast
there is a series of 'bad' boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others,
whose badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and
frequenting public-houses. All these boys are constantly on the
verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel if
any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any
really serious offence. Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a
motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the form in which it
actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into
the stories, and very rarely there is something approaching a mild
flirtation, but it is entirely in the spirit of clean fun. A boy
and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together–that is all
it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as
'soppy'. Even the bad boys are presumed to be completely sexless.
When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is probable that there was
a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for
boys. In the nineties the BOYS' OWN PAPER, for instance, used to
have its correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against
masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED'S and TOM BROWN'S
SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex
simply does not exist as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the
whole thirty years' issue of the two papers the word 'God' probably
does not occur, except in 'God save the King'. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong 'temperance' strain. Drinking
and, by association, smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful
even in an adult ('shady' is the usual word), but at the same time
as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for
sex. In their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal
in common with the Boy Scout movement, which started at about the
same time.

All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake,
for instance, started off quite frankly as an imitation of Sherlock
Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he has hawk-like
features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a
dressing-gown when he wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably
owe something to the old school-story writers who were flourishing
when they began, Gunby Hadath, Desmond Coke and the rest, but they
owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as Greyfriars and
St Jim's are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom
Brown's Rugby than a modern public school. Neither school has an
O.T.G., for instance, games are not compulsory, and the boys are
even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But without doubt the
main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This book has had
an immense influence on boys' literature, and it is one of those
books which have a sort of traditional reputation among people who
have never even seen a copy of it. More than once in boys' weekly
papers I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which
the word was spelt 'Storky'. Even the name of the chief comic among
the Greyfriars masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO.,
and so is much of the slang; 'jape', 'merry','giddy', 'bizney'
(business), 'frabjous', 'don't' for 'doesn't'–all of them out
of date even when GEM and MAGNET started. There are also traces of
earlier origins. The name 'Greyfriars' is probably taken from
Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in the MAGNET, talks in
an imitation of Dickens's dialect.

With all this, the supposed 'glamour' of public-school life is
played for all it is worth. There is all the usual
paraphernalia–lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging,
prefects, cosy teas round the study fire, etc. etc.–and
constant reference to the 'old school', the 'old grey stones' (both
schools were founded in the early sixteenth century), the 'team
spirit' of the 'Greyfriars men'. As for the snob-appeal, it is
completely shameless. Each school has a titled boy or two whose
titles are constantly thrust in the reader's face; other boys have
the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners,
Lowther. We are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the
Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, son of Lord Eastwood, that Jack Blake
is heir to 'broad acres', that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (nicknamed
Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vernon-Smith's father is a
millionaire. Till recently the illustrations in both papers always
depicted the boys in clothes imitated from those of Eton; in the
last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and flannel
trousers, but St Jim's still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy
sticks to his top-hat. In the school magazine which appears every
week as part of the MAGNET, Harry Wharton writes an article
discussing the pocket-money received by the 'fellows in the
Remove', and reveals that some of them get as much as five pounds a
week! This kind of thing is a perfectly deliberate incitement to
wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing a rather curious
fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to
England. So far as I know, there are extremely few school stories
in foreign languages. The reason, obviously, is that in England
education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite dividing
line between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is that
the former pay for their education, and within the bourgeoisie
there is another unbridgeable gulf between the 'public' school and
the 'private' school. It is quite clear that there are tens and
scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a
'posh' public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen
to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colours,
but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in
it for hours at a stretch. The question is, Who arc these people?
Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?

Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of
thing. All I can say from my own observation is this. Boys who are
likely to go to public schools themselves generally read the GEM
and MAGNET, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are
about twelve; they may continue for another year from force of
habit, but by that time they have ceased to take them seriously. On
the other hand, the boys at very cheap private schools, the schools
that are designed for people who can't afford a public school but
consider the Council schools 'common', continue reading the GEM and
MAGNET for several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at
two of these schools myself. I found that not only did virtually
all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they were still
taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even
sixteen. These boys were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees
and small business and professional men, and obviously it is this
class that the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are certainly
read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in
the poorest quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read
by boys whom one might expect to be completely immune from
public-school 'glamour'. I have seen a young coal miner, for
instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground,
eagerly reading the GEM. Recently I offered a batch of English
papers to some British legionaries of the French Foreign Legion in
North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first. Both papers
are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the GEM
shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by
Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, Malays, Arabs, Straits
Chinese, etc., etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to
be aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk
chocolate, postage stamps, water pistols, blushing cured, home
conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring which runs a
needle into your friend's hand, etc., etc.) indicate roughly the
same age; there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however,
which call for youths between seventeen and twenty-two. And there
is no question that these papers are also read by adults. It is
quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they
have read every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty
years. Here, for instance, is a letter from a lady in
Salisbury:

I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of
Greyfriars, that they never fail to reach a high standard. Without
doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the market
to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to
face with Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have
followed the adventures of Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt
interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there's always a
rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too,
was a staunch reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away
from us.

It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and
MAGNET, especially the GEM, simply to have a look at the
correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the intense
interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and
St Jim's are followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the
questions sent in by readers:

What age is Dick Roylance?' 'How old is St Jim's?' 'Can you give
me a list of the Shell and their studies?' 'How much did D'Arcy's
monocle cost?' 'How is it that fellows like Crooke are in the Shell
and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth?' 'What arc
the Form captain's three chief duties?' 'Who is the chemistry
master at St Jim's?' (From a girl) 'Where is St Jim's situated?
COULD you tell me how to get there, as I would love to sec the
building? Are you boys just "phoneys", as I think you are?'

It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these
letters are living a complete fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will
write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight, chest and
bicep measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth
Form he most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the
studies on the Shell passage, with an exact account of who lives in
each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do everything
in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM Jack Blake is
supposed to write answers to correspondents, and in the MAGNET a
couple of pages is always given up to the school magazine (the
GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and there is another
page in which one or other character is written up each week. The
stories run in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the
foreground for several weeks at a time. First there will be a
series of rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five
and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on mistaken
identity, with Wibley (the make-up wizard) in the star part; then a
run of more serious stories in which Vernon-Smith is trembling on
the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of
the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why they continue to be
read in spite of their obvious out-of-dateness.

It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give
almost every type of reader a character he can identify himself
with. Most boys' papers aim at doing this, hence the boy-assistant
(Sexton Blake's Tinker, Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures.
But in these cases there is only one boy, and usually it is much
the same type of boy. In the GEM and MAGNET there is a model for
very nearly everybody. There is the normal athletic, high-spirited
boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier
version of this type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version
(Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry Wharton),
and a stolid, 'bulldog' version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the
reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely
'clever', studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the
eccentric boy who is not good at games but possesses some special
talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom
Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he
makes it possible for boys from very poor homes to project
themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In addition there are
Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to
play upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization
goes deeper than this. If one studies the correspondence columns
one sees that there is probably NO character in the GEM and MAGNET
whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the
out-and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the
money-grabbing American boy) and, of course, the masters. Bunter,
though in his origin he probably owed something to the fat boy in
PICKWICK, is a real creation. His tight trousers against which
boots and canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search
of food, his postal order which never turns up, have made him
famous wherever the Union Jack waves. But he is not a subject for
day-dreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy
(the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, 'the swell of St Jim's'), is
evidently much admired. Like everything else in the GEM and MAGNET,
Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He is the 'knut' of the
early twentieth century or even the 'masher' of the nineties ('Bai
Jove, deah boy!' and 'Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a
feahful thwashin'!'), the monocled idiot who made good on the
fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And his evident popularity goes to
show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are
extremely fond of the titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Whimsey) who
always turns up trumps in the moment of emergency. Here is a letter
from one of Gussy's girl admirers;

I think you're too hard on Gussy. I wonder he's still In
existence, the way you treat him. He's my hero. Did you know I
write lyrics? How's this–to the tune of 'Goody Goody'?

Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
'Cos I'm wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench
Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can't get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: 'Don't disturb!'
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That's soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.

P.S.–Do you get on well with girls?

I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is
interesting as being probably the earliest mention of Hitler in the
GEM. In the GEM there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty Wynn, as a
set-off against Bunter. Vernon-Smith, 'the Bounder of the Remove',
a Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another
great favourite. And even some of the cads probably have their
following. Loder, for instance, 'the rotter of the Sixth', is a
cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things
about football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only
think him all the more of a cad for this, but a certain type of boy
would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke & Co. are
probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to
smoke cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence
column; 'What brand of cigarettes does Racke smoke?')

Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative,
but in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In
reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever
changes, and foreigners are funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are
still Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French
master at Greyfriars, is the usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed
beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy, though a rajah,
and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the
PUNCH tradition. ("The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my
esteemed Bob," said Inky. "Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and
bitefulness, but the soft answer is the cracked pitcher that goes
longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks.")
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee ("Waal, I guess",
etc.) dating from a peroid of Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung,
the Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late, no doubt because
some of the MAGNET'S readers are Straits Chinese), is the
nineteenth-century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat,
pigtail and pidgin-English. The assumption all along is not only
that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at,
but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects.
That is why in all boys' papers, not only the GEM and MAGNET, a
Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the thing you
recognize him by, like the Frenchman's beard or the Italian's
barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that
when the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is
made to describe the natives as individual human beings, but as a
rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike
and will conform more or less exactly to the following
patterns:

The working classes only enter into the GEM and MAGNET as comics
or semi-villains (race-course touts, etc.). As for class-friction,
trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil
war–not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years'
issue of the two papers you might perhaps find the word
'Socialism', but you would have to look a long time for it. If the
Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it will be indirectly,
in the word 'Bolshy' (meaning a person of violent disagreeable
habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their
appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above. The war-crisis
of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a story in
which Mr Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's millionaire father, cashed in
on the general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell
them to 'crisis scuttlers'. But that is probably as near to
noticing the European situation as the GEM and MAGNET will come,
until the war actually starts. That does not mean that these papers
are unpatriotic–quite the contrary! Throughout the Great War
the GEM and MAGNET were perhaps the most consistently and
cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost every week the boys
caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the
rationing period 'EAT LESS BREAD' was printed in large type on
every page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with
power-politics or 'ideological' warfare. It is more akin to family
loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude
of ordinary people, especially the huge untouched block of the
middle class and the better-off working class. These people are
patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do not feel that
what happens in foreign countries is any of their business. When
England is in danger they rally to its defence as a matter of
course, but in between-times they are not interested. After all,
England is always in the right and England always wins, so why
worry? It is an attitude that has been shaken during the past
twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes supposed. Failure
to understand it is one of the reasons why Left Wing political
parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign
policy.

The mental world of the GEM and MAGNET, therefore, is something
like this:

The year is 1910–or 1940, but it is all the same. You are
at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made
clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage
after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in
the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and
outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the
old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a
pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and
gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet
are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the
monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer
has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a
tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam
and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a
good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week's
match against Rook-wood. Everything is safe, solid and
unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That
approximately is the atmosphere.

But now turn from the GEM and MAGNET to the more up-to-date
papers which have appeared since the Great War. The truly
significant thing is that they have more points of resemblance to
the GEM and MAGNET than points of difference. But it is better to
consider the differences first.

There are eight of these newer papers, the MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH,
CHAMPION, WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE. All of
these have appeared since the Great War, but except for the MODERN
BOY none of them is less than five years old. Two papers which
ought also to be mentioned briefly here; though they are not
strictly in the same class as the rest, are the DETECTIVE WEEKLY
and the THRILLER, both owned by the Amalgamated Press. The
DETECTIVE WEEKLY has taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these papers
admit a certain amount of sex-interest into their stories, and
though certainly read by boys; they are not aimed at them
exclusively. All the others are boys' papers pure and simple, and
they are sufficiently alike to be considered together. There does
not seem to be any notable difference between Thomson's
publications and those of the Amalgamated Press.

As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical
superiority to the GEM and MAGNET. To begin with, they have the
great advantage of not being written entirely by one person.
Instead of one long complete story, a number of the WIZARD or
HOTSPUR consists of half a dozen or more serials, none of which
goes on for ever. Consequently there is far more variety and far
less padding, and none of the tiresome stylization and
facetiousness of the GEM and MAGNET. Look at these two extracts,
for example:

Billy Bunter groaned.

A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that
Bunter was booked for extra French.

In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But
every one of those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They
seemed to crawl by like tired snails.

Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could
hardly believe that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more
like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days!

Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did
not matter. Bunter did! (The Magnet)

* * *

After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice
every step of the way up. Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties
was now clinging like a human fly to the face of an icy cliff, as
smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.

An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body,
driving the blinding snow into his face, seeking to tear his
fingers loose from their handholds and dash him to death on the
jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet
below.

Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers
who had done their best to shoot down Lionheart and his companion,
Constable Jim Rogers–until the blizzard had blotted the two
Mounties out of sight from below. (The Wizard)

The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the
first takes a hundred words to tell you that Bunter is in the
detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school stories
(in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates in all
these papers, except the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the
WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., have far greater opportunities for
sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations of the
papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of
the things I see. On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the
wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and shooting down another aeroplane
with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming for his life
down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after
him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a
steel robot feels for him with its claws. On another a man in
airman's costume is fighting barehanded against a rat somewhat
larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific
muscular development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung
it thirty yards over the wall of an arena, with the words, 'Take
back your blooming lion!' Clearly no school story can compete with
this kind of thing. From time to time the school buildings may
catch fire or the French master may turn out to be the head of an
international anarchist gang, but in a general way the interest
must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc.
There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns,
aeroplanes, mustangs, octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.

Examination of a large number of these papers shows that,
putting aside school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild West,
Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective's
angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the
infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional
football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood,
Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc.) and scientific invention. The Wild
West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian
seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really new is the
scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots,
helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and
there there are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless
glands. Whereas the GEM and MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling,
the WIZARD, CHAMPION, MODERN BOY, etc., owe a great deal to H. G.
Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of
'Scientifiction'. Naturally it is the magical Martian aspect of
science that is most exploited, but one or two papers include
serious articles on scientific subjects, besides quantities of
informative snippets. (Examples: 'A Kauri tree in Queensland,
Australia, is over 12,000 years old'; 'Nearly 50,000 thunderstorms
occur every day'; 'Helium gas costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet';
'There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain'; 'London
firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually', etc., etc.)
There is a marked advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the
whole, in the demand made on the reader's attention. In practice
the GEM and MAGNET and the post-war papers are read by much the
same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a
year or two years–an improvement probably corresponding to
the improvement in elementary education since 1909.

The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys' papers,
though not to anything like the extent one would expect, is
bully-worship and the cult of violence.

If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern
paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is the absence of the
leader-principle. There is no central dominating character; instead
there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an
equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the
more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of
identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the
reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc., is led to identify with a
G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with
an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist–at any rate
with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone
about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock
on the jaw. This character is intended as a superman, and as
physical strength is the form of power that boys can best
understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla; in the Tarzan
type of story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet
high. At the same time the scenes of violence in nearly all these
stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is a great
difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper
and the threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc.
(not strictly boys' papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank
Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the
all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon
that has been perfected by people who brood endlessly on violence.
A paper like FIGHT STORIES, for instance, would have very little
appeal except to sadists and masochists. You can see the
comparative gentleness of the English civilization by the
amateurish way in which prize-fighting is always described in the
boys' weeklies. There is no specialized vocabulary. Look at these
four extracts, two English, two American;

When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each
had great red marks on his chest. Bill's chin was bleeding, and Ben
had a cut over his right eye.

Into their corners they sank, but when the gong clanged again
they were up swiftly, and they went like tigers at each other.
(ROVER)

* * *

He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face.
Blood spattered and I went back on my heels, but surged in and
ripped my right under the heart. Another right smashed full on
Ben's already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a
tooth, he crashed a flailing left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)

* * *

It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles
rippled and slid under his dark skin. There was all the power and
grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible onslaught.

He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow.
In a moment Ben was simply blocking with his gloves as well as he
could. Ben was really a past-master of defence. He had many fine
victories behind him. But the Negro's rights and lefts crashed
through openings that hardly any other fighter could have found.
(WIZARD)

* * *

Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs
crashing down under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two
heavies as they swapped punches. (FIGHT STORIES)

Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound.
They are written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others are
not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its level the moral
code of the English boys' papers is a decent one. Crime and
dishonesty are never held up to admiration, there is none of the
cynicism and corruption of the American gangster story. The huge
sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that there is a demand for
that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to
produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in
America, it was interesting to see how promptly 'anti-Fascism' was
adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags.
One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long,
complete story, 'When Hell Game to America', in which the agents of
a 'blood-maddened European dictator' are trying to conquer the
U.S.A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the
frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to
women's backs and fling them off heights to watch them blown to
pieces in mid-air, others in which they tie naked girls together by
their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc., etc.
The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for
tightening up restrictions against immigrants. On another page of
the same paper: 'LIVES OF THE HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the
intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of the famous Broadway
Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c.' 'HOW TO LOVE. 10c.'
'FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c.' 'NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS. From the
outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed.
Turn it around and look through the glass and oh! what a
difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c.,' etc., etc., etc. There is
nothing at all like this in any English paper likely to be read by
boys. But the process of Americanization is going on all the same.
The American ideal, the 'he-man', the 'tough guy', the gorilla who
puts everything right by socking everybody on the jaw, now figures
in probably a majority of boys' papers. In one serial now running
in the SKIPPER he is always portrayed ominously enough, swinging a
rubber truncheon.

The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., as against the
earlier boys' papers, boils down to this: better technique, more
scientific interest, more bloodshed, more leader-worship. But,
after all, it is the LACK of development that is the really
striking thing.

To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The
world of the SKIPPER and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world
of the MAGNET and the GEM. The Wild West story, for instance, with
its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia belonging to
the eighties, is a curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing
that in papers of this type it is always taken for granted that
adventures only happen at the ends of the earth, in tropical
forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies,
in Chinese opium dens–everywhere in fact, except the places
where things really DO happen. That is a belief dating from thirty
or forty years ago, when the new continents were in process of
being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure,
the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the
picturesque side of the Great War, contemporary history is
carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now admired
instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same
figures of fun that they always were. If a Chinese character
appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-smuggler of Sax
Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China
since 1912–no indication that a war is going on there, for
instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is still a 'dago' or 'greaser'
who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back; no indication
that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have
not yet appeared, or are barely making their appearance. There will
be plenty about them in a little while, but it will be from a
strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Germany), with the real
meaning of the struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As
for the Russian Revolution, it is extremely difficult to find any
reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is mentioned at
all it is usually in an information snippet (example: 'There are
29,000 centenarians in the USSR.'), and any reference to the
Revolution is indirect and twenty years out of date. In one story
in the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear, and as it is
a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky–obviously an echo of
the 1917-23 period and not of recent controversies. The clock has
stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the waves, and no one has heard of
slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or concentration
camps.

And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The
snobbishness is somewhat less open than in the GEM and
MAGNET–that is the most one can possibly say. To begin with,
the school story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no
means eliminated. Every number of a boys' paper includes at least
one school story, these stories slightly outnumbering the Wild
Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM and MAGNET is
not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure,
but the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When
a new school is introduced at the beginning of a story we are often
told in just those words that 'it was a very posh school'. From
time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed AGAINST
snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes
fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme
is sometimes presented in this form: there is great rivalry between
two schools, one of which considers itself more 'posh' than the
other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches,
etc., always ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one
glances very superficially at some of these stories it is possible
to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the boys'
weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely
reflect the bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar
class. Their real function is to allow the boy who goes to a cheap
private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as 'posh' in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The
sentiment of school loyalty ('We're better than the fellows down
the road'), a thing almost unknown to the real working class, is
still kept up. As these stories are written by many different
hands, they do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are
reasonably free from snobbishness, in others money and pedigree are
exploited even more shamelessly than in the GEM and MAGNET. In one
that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys mentioned were
titled.

Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as
comics (jokes about tramps, convicts, etc.), or as prize-fighters,
acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and Foreign
Legionaries–in other words, as adventurers. There is no
facing of the facts about working-class life, or, indeed, about
WORKING life of any description. Very occasionally one may come
across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but in
all probability it will only be there as the background of some
lurid adventure. In any case the central character is not likely to
be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who reads these
papers–in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend
his life working in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job
in an office–is led to identify with people in positions of
command, above all with people who are never troubled by shortage
of money. The Lord Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who
drawls and wears a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of
danger, turns up over and over again. (This character is a great
favourite in Secret Service stories.) And, as usual, the heroic
characters all have to talk B.B.C.; they may talk Scottish or Irish
or American, but no one in a star part is ever permitted to drop an
aitch. Here it is worth comparing the social atmosphere of the
boys' weeklies with that of the women's weeklies, the ORACLE, the
FAMILY STAR, PEG'S PAPER, etc.

The women's papers are aimed at an older public and are read for
the most part by girls who are working for a living. Consequently
they are on the surface much more realistic. It is taken for
granted, for example, that nearly everyone has to live in a big
town and work at a more or less dull job. Sex, so far from being
taboo, is THE subject. The short, complete stories, the special
feature of these papers, are generally of the 'came the dawn' type:
the heroine narrowly escapes losing her 'boy' to a designing rival,
or the 'boy' loses his job and has to postpone marriage, but
presently gets a better job. The changeling-fantasy (a girl brought
up in a poor home is 'really' the child of rich parents) is another
favourite. Where sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials,
it arises out of the more domestic type of crime, such as bigamy,
forgery or sometimes murder; no Martians, death-rays or
international anarchist gangs. These papers are at any rate aiming
at credibility, and they have a link with real life in their
correspondence columns, where genuine problems are being discussed.
Ruby M. Ayres's column of advice in the ORACLE, for instance, is
extremely sensible and well written. And yet the world of the
ORACLE and PEG'S PAPER is a pure fantasy-world. It is the same
fantasy all the time; pretending to be richer than you are. The
chief impression that one carries away from almost every story in
these papers is of a frightful, overwhelming 'refinement'.
Ostensibly the characters are working-class people, but their
habits, the interiors of their houses, their clothes, their outlook
and, above all, their speech arc entirely middle class. They are
all living at several pounds a week above their income. And
needless to say, that is just the impression that is intended. The
idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-out mother of five a
dream-life in which she pictures herself–not actually as a
duchess (that convention has gone out) but as, say, the wife of a
bank-manager. Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of
life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is
how working-class people really DO live. The major facts arc simply
not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose
their jobs; but then the dark clouds roll away and they get better
jobs instead. No mention of un-employment as something permanent
and inevitable, no mention of the dole, no mention of trade
unionism. No suggestion anywhere that there can be anything wrong
with the system AS A SYSTEM; there arc only individual misfortunes,
which are generally due to somebody's wickedness and can in any
case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll
away, the kind employer raises Alfred's wages, and there are jobs
for everybody except the drunks. It is still the world of the
WIZARD and the GEM, except that there are orange-blossoms instead
of machine-guns.

The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather
exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910.
Yes, it may be said, but what does it matter? And in any case, what
else do you expect?

Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called
penny dreadful into a realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An
adventure story must of its nature be more or less remote from real
life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the
WIZARD and the GEM is not so artless as it looks. These papers
exist because of a specialized demand, because boys at certain ages
find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears
and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it
wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think
suitable for them. To what extent people draw their ideas from
fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are
influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial
stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the
worst books are often the most important, because they are usually
the ones that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many
people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and
'advanced' are actually carrying through life an imaginative
background which they acquired in childhood from (for instance)
Sapper and Ian Hay. If that is so, the boys' twopenny weeklies are
of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff that is read somewhere
between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion,
perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who
will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it
they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as
hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative
Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being
pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time
do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE
capitalism, that foreigners are un-important comics and that the
British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for
ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe
that this is un-intentional. Of the twelve papers I have been
discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER and DETECTIVE
WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is
one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more
than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are
closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES.
This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if
it were not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are
politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a
fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions
bare-handed (and what boy doesn't?), you can only have it by
delivering yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord Camrose.
For there is no competition. Throughout the whole of this run of
papers the differences are negligible, and on this level no others
exist. This raises the question, why is there no such thing as a
left-wing boys' paper?

At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It
is so horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would
be like, if it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic
person handing round Communist tracts among a crowd of
public-school boys. The tract I received was of the
question-and-answer kind:

Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing
paper deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not
suggest that the whole of its contents would be exactly like the
tract I have quoted above, but does anyone doubt that they would be
SOMETHING like it? Inevitably such a paper would either consist of
dreary up-lift or it would be under Communist influence and given
over to adulation of Soviet Russia; in either case no normal boy
would ever look at it. Highbrow literature apart, the whole of the
existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously
'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist paper in England which
could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the DAILY HERALD: and
how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At this moment,
therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time likely
to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something
almost beyond hoping for.

But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear
reason why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up
with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the
stories in the HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative
tracts; they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative bias.
It is fairly easy to imagine the process being reversed. It is
possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and lively
as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and 'ideology' a little
more up to date. It is even possible (though this raises other
difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same literary level
as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but
taking rather more account of the realities of working-class life.
Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the
last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in
Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist
origin. Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did
not see their social significance, and I lost the collection of
them that I had, but no doubt copies would still be procurable. In
get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English
fourpenny novelette, except that their inspiration was 'left'. If,
for instance, a story described police pursuing anarchists through
the mountains, it would be from the point of view of the anarchist
and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is the Soviet film
CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in London.
Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,
CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the
unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from
Hollywood. The one thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the
remarkable performance by the actor who takes the part of the White
officer (the fat one)–a performance which looks very like an
inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar.
All the usual paraphernalia is there–heroic fight against
odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses, love
interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the
Russian Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds
demons. In the Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites
demons. That is also a lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less
pernicious lie than the other.

Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their
general nature is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss
them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in England, popular
imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never
begun to enter. ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom
libraries downwards is censored in the interests of the ruling
class. And boys' fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff
which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in
the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one
believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression
behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe nothing
of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.

CHARLES DICKENS (1940)

I

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.
Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of
theft, if you come to think of it.

When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition
of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit
Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and
more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made
spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty
revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as 'almost' a Marxist, the
Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and both claim him as a
champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as Chesterton would
have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little
book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin went
to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found
Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he
walked out in the middle of a scene.

Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected
to mean by it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of
Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike
of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of
people have found him unreadable, but very few seem to have felt
any hostility towards the general spirit of his work. Some years
later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts published a full-length attack on
Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a
merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens's
treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents which not one in a
thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about, and which no
more invalidates his work than the second-best bed invalidates
HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer's
literary personality has little or nothing to do with his private
character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was
just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts
makes him appear. But in his published work there is implied a
personality quite different from this, a personality which has won
him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been
otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a
subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully say a rebel.
Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt this. Gissing,
for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but
a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and
wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to deny it.
In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens
attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since
been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself
hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have
swallowed him so completely that he has become a national
institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English
public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a
blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was
ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my throat by
schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong
resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be
told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT
is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded
in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this
makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in
his attack upon society. Where exactly does he stand, socially,
morally, and politically? As usual, one can define his position
more easily if one starts by deciding what he was NOT.

In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson
seem to imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not
write about the proletariat, in which he merely resembles the
overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look
for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction,
all you find is a hole. This statement needs qualifying, perhaps.
For reasons that are easy enough to see, the agricultural labourer
(in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction,
and a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and,
more recently, the working-class intelligentsia. But the ordinary
town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have
always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way
between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of
pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's stories
almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If one
examines his novels in detail one finds that his real
subject-matter is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their
hangers-on–lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small
craftsmen, and servants. He has no portrait of an agricultural
worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in HARD TIMES) of an
industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are probably his
best picture of a working-class family–the Peggottys, for
instance, hardly belong to the working class–but on the whole
he is not successful with this type of character. If you ask any
ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can
remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes,
Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet, and a drunken
midwife–not exactly a representative cross-section of the
English working class.

Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens
is not a 'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some
defining.

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a
hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who
thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and
abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles
Reade, for instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than
Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated the
abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a series of novels
which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he
probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but
important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given
the existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied.
Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the
open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be well that is
how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can
cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one can
see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It
is when one asks 'Which root?' that one begins to grasp his
position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost
exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive
suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary
government, the educational system and so forth, without ever
clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it
is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to
make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's
attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign
that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he
believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown.
For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'.
It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage
suggesting that the economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere,
for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or
private property. Even in a book like OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which
turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by
means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that
individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course
one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again
from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES,
and indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil
of LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference
himself. It is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES
because he disapproved of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously
Macaulay is here using the word 'Socialism' in the same sense in
which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a Cubist picture used
to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is not a line in the book
that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if
anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that
capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been
morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work
well enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as
social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens
than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His
whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous
platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be
decent.

Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions
of authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent
Dickens figure, the good rich man. This character belongs
especially to Dickens's early optimistic period. He is usually a
'merchant' (we are not necessarily told what merchandise he deals
in), and he is always a superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who
'trots' to and fro, raising his employees' wages, patting children
on the head, getting debtors out of jail and in general, acting the
fairy godmother. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further
from real life than, say, Squeers or Micawber. Even Dickens must
have reflected occasionally that anyone who was so anxious to give
his money away would never have acquired it in the first place. Mr.
Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it is difficult
to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this character
runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier books.
Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge–it is the
same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out
guineas. Dickens does however show signs of development here. In
the books of the middle period the good rich man fades out to some
extent. There is no one who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS–GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in
fact, definitely an attack on patronage–and in HARD TIMES it
is only very doubtfully played by Gradgrind after his reformation.
The character reappears in a rather different form as Meagles in
LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE–one might
perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books
the good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a RENTIER. This
is significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can
and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for
him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the
Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's
wages. The seeming inference from the rather despondent books that
Dickens wrote in the fifties is that by that time he had grasped
the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society.
Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
(published 1864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in
the person of Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by origin and only
rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX MACHINA, solving
everybody's problems by showering money in all directions. He even
'trots', like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is
a return to the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return
either. Dickens's thoughts seem to have come full circle. Once
again, individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.

One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about
is child labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children
in his books, but usually they are suffering in schools rather than
in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he
gives is the description in DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David
washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's warehouse. This, of
course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of ten, had
worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he
describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his
parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after
they were married. Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID
COPPERFIELD:

It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have
been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent
abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager,
delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to
me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was
made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in
the service of Murdstone & Grinby.

And again, having described the rough boys among whom he
worked:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship...and felt my hopes of growing up to be a
learned and distinguished man crushed in my bosom.

Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is
Dickens himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography
that he began and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens
is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours
a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that
NO child ought to be condemned to such a fate, and there is no
reason for inferring that he thinks it. David escapes from the
warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are
still there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens
particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the
STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not
believe that any good can come out of Parliament–he had been
a Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a
disillusioning experience–and he is slightly hostile to the
most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES
trade unionism is represented as something not much better than a
racket, something that happens because employers are not
sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to join the
union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson
has pointed out, the apprentices' association in BARNABY RUDGE, to
which Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or
barely legal unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret
assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants the workers
to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to
take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open
violence.

As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower
sense in two novels, BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In
BARNABY RUDGE it is a case of rioting rather than revolution. The
Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had religious bigotry as a
pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst of
looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently
indicated by the fact that his first idea was to make the
ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum. He
was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in
fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots
Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights
in describing scenes in which the 'dregs' of the population behave
with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great
psychological interest, because they show how deeply he had brooded
on this subject. The things he describes can only have come out of
his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had
happened in his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for
instance:

If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have
issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made.
There were men there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers
as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched them from
their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men
who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to
fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep
unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and
paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were
restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly
longing. On the skull of one drunken lad–not twenty, by his
looks–who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the
lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire,
white hot, melting his head like wax...But of all the howling
throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these sights; nor
was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.

You might almost think you were reading a description of 'Red'
Spain by a partisan of General Franco. One ought, of course, to
remember that when Dickens was writing, the London 'mob' still
existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and
the growth and shift of population had brought into existence a
huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until the early middle of the
nineteenth century there was hardly such a thing as a police force.
When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing between
shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A
TALE OF TWO CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really
about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not
entirely different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a
book which tends to leave a false impression behind, especially
after a lapse of time.

The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES
remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by
the guillotine–tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives,
heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as
they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but
they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book
is rather slow going. But A TALE OF TWO CITIES is not a companion
volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens sees clearly enough that
the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the
people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you
behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will
follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly
being reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four
liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving
outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will
presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine,
etc., etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes,
is insisted upon in the clearest terms:

It was too much the way...to talk of this terrible Revolution as
if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not
been sown–as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be
done, that had led to it–as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably
coming, years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they
saw.

And again:

All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since
imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization,
Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety
of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a
peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more
certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity
out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist
itself into the same tortured forms.

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves.
But there is no perception here of what is now called historic
necessity. Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the
causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The
Revolution is something that happens because centuries of
oppression have made the French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked
nobleman could somehow have turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge,
there would have been no Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no
guillotine–and so much the better. This is the opposite of
the 'revolutionary' attitude. From the 'revolutionary' point of
view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and
therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt
is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who
guillotines the nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that
can be interpreted as meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is
merely a monster that is begotten by tyranny and always ends by
devouring its own instruments. In Sydney Carton's vision at the
foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge and the other leading
spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same
knife–which, in fact, was approximately what happened.

And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is
why everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES; they have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own
nightmare. Again and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors
of revolution–the mass-butcheries, the injustice, the
ever-present terror of spies, the frightful blood-lust of the mob.
The descriptions of the Paris mob–the description, for
instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone
to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the
September massacres–outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The
revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages–in
fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious
imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the 'Carmagnole',
for instance:

There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were
dancing like five thousand demons...They danced to the popular
Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing
of teeth in unison... They advanced, retreated, struck at one
another's hands, clutched at one another's heads, spun round alone,
caught one another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them
dropped...Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time
afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way, and, with
their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming
off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It
was so emphatically a fallen sport–a something, once
innocent, delivered over to all devilry.

He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for
guillotining children. The passage I have abridged above ought to
be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was Dickens's
horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch,
'with their heads low down and their hands high up', etc., and the
evil vision it conveys. Madame Defarge is a truly dreadful figure,
certainly Dickens's most successful attempt at a MALIGNANT
character. Defarge and others are simply 'the new oppressors who
have risen in the destruction of the old', the revolutionary courts
are presided over by 'the lowest, cruellest and worst populace',
and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens insists upon
the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he
shows a great deal of prescience. 'A law of the suspected, which
struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over
any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons
gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain
no hearing'–it would apply pretty accurately to several
countries today.

The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its
horrors; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them–and from a
historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the
Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear.
Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied
massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the
Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared
with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and the
tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister
vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of
readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word 'tumbril' has a murderous
sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To
this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no
more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is a strange thing that
Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution
than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in
creating this impression.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only
remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for,
but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can
catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens's
preoccupation with childhood.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about
childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has
accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now
comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power
of entering into the child's point of view. I must have been about
nine years old when I first read DAVID COPPERFIELD. The mental
atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible
to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written BY A CHILD. And
yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones,
for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic
monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to
stand both inside and outside the child's mind, in such a way that
the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according
to the age at which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene
in which David Copperfield is unjustly suspected of eating the
mutton chops; or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT EXPECTATIONS,
coming back from Miss Havisham's house and finding himself
completely unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a
series of outrageous lies–which, of course, are eagerly
believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And how
accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child's mind, its
visualizing tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of
impression. Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his
dead parents were derived from their tombstones:

The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea
that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From
the character and turn of the inscription, 'ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF
THE ABOVE', I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was
freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a
foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers
of mine...I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that
they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their
trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.

There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting
Mr. Murdstone's hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to
wear on his back a placard saying, 'Take care of him. He bites.' He
looks at the door in the playground where the boys have carved
their names, and from the appearance of each name he seems to know
in just what tone of voice the boy will read out the placard:

There was one boy–a certain J. Steerforth–who cut
his name very deep and very often, who, I conceived, would read it
in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair. There was
another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of
it, and pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a
third, George Demple, who I fancied would sing it.

When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those
were exactly the pictures that those particular names would call
up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words
(Demple–'temple'; Traddles–probably 'skedaddle'). But
how many people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A
sympathetic attitude towards children was a much rarer thing in
Dickens's day than it is now. The early nineteenth century was not
a good time to be a child. In Dickens's youth children were still
being 'solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to
be seen', and it was not so long since boys of thirteen had been
hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of 'breaking the child's
spirit' was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a standard
book for children till late into the century. This evil book is now
issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is well worth
reading in the original version. It gives one some idea of the
lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr.
Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling,
first thrashes them, reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark
and bite' between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend
the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a
murderer is hanging. In the earlier part of the century scores of
thousands of children, aged sometimes as young as six, were
literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills, and even at
the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with
blood for a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens
seems to have recognized, and which most of his contemporaries did
not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I think this can
be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. But
mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and
though there is a fair number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are
generally scoundrels.

Except for the universities and the big public schools, every
kind of education then existing in England gets a mauling at
Dickens's hands. There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where little
boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting
charity schools of the period, which produced specimens like Noah
Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and
the disgraceful little dame-school kept by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt.
Some of what Dickens says remains true even today. Salem House is
the ancestor of the modern 'prep school', which still has a good
deal of resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, some
old fraud of much the same stamp is carrying on at this moment in
nearly every small town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's
criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy
of an educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the
wax-ended cane; on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind
of school that is coming up in the fifties and sixties, the
'modern' school, with its gritty insistence on 'facts'. What, then,
DOES he want? As always, what he appears to want is a moralized
version of the existing thing–the old type of school, but
with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much
Greek. Doctor Strong's school, to which David Copperfield goes
after he escapes from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem
House with the vices left out and a good deal of 'old grey stones'
atmosphere thrown in:

Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr.
Creakle's as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously
ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to
the honour and good faith of the boys...which worked wonders. We
all felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in
sustaining its character and dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly
attached to it–I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in
all my time, of any boy being otherwise–and learnt with a
good will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of
hours, and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I remember, we were
well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our
appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor
Strong's boys.

In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens's
utter lack of any educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL
atmosphere of a good school, but nothing further. The boys 'learnt
with a good will', but what did they learn? No doubt it was Doctor
Blimber's curriculum, a little watered down. Considering the
attitude to society that is everywhere implied in Dickens's novels,
it comes as rather a shock to learn that he sent his eldest son to
Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary educational
mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he
was painfully conscious of being under-educated himself. Here
perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical
learning. Dickens had had little or no formal education, but he
lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been
aware of this. If he was unable to imagine a better school than
Doctor Strong's, or, in real life, than Eton, it was probably due
to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing
suggests.

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is
always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of
structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite
remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is
always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently
summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different
from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two things can be very much
alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same
place. Useless to change institutions without a 'change of
heart'–that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a
reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of
people who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO. But Dickens is
not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single
impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of
tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a
revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely
moral criticism of society may not be just as
'revolutionary'–and revolution, after all, means turning
things upside down–as the politico-economic criticism which
is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but
there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in
a poem like 'I wander through each charted street' than in
three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an
illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the
old–generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant.
Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can
you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The
other, what is the use of changing the system before you have
improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and
they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The
moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one
another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the
moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are
at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at
the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet
more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot
yet foresee. The central problem–how to prevent power from
being abused–remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the
vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had
the vision to see that. 'If men would behave decently the world
would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds.

II

More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be
explained in terms of his social origin, though actually his family
history was not quite what one would infer from his novels. His
father was a clerk in government service, and through his mother's
family he had connexions with both the Army and the Navy. But from
the age of nine onwards he was brought up in London in commercial
surroundings, and generally in an atmosphere of struggling poverty.
Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie, and he happens
to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the
'points', as it were, very highly developed. That is partly what
makes him so interesting. If one wants a modern equivalent, the
nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history
and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold
Bennett was essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other
two, he was a midlander, with an industrial and noncomformist
rather than commercial and Anglican background.

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban
bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a
middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either
laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact
with industry or the soil; on the other, no contact with the
governing classes. Anyone who has studied Wells's novels in detail
will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison,
he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm
for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people he believes
to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners,
priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first
sight a list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks
like a mere omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a
common factor. All of them are archaic types, people who are
governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the
past–the opposite, therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has
put his money on the future and sees the past simply as a dead
hand.

Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the
bourgeoisie was really a rising class, he displays this
characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious
of the future and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the
'quaint old church', etc.). Nevertheless his list of most hated
types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to be striking.
He is vaguely on the side of the working class–has a sort of
generalized sympathy with them because they are oppressed–but
he does not in reality know much about them; they come into his
books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At the other
end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and–going one
better than Wells in this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His
real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick on the upper side and
Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term 'aristocrat', for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.

Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy,
who hardly enter into his books, as their petty offshoots, the
cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureaucrats
and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess
hostile sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly.
There are practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class,
for instance. One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester
Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock figure
the 'good old squire') and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has
Dickens's sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. There are
no friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e. officers), and none at all
of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges and magistrates, most
of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The
only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness
are, significantly enough, policemen.

Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman,
because it is part of the English puritan tradition, which is not
dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by
adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of
obscurity. It had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact
with agriculture, and politically impotent; government, in its
experience, was something which either interfered or persecuted.
Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and
not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable
about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their
complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of
individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the
community exists. On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he
was neglecting his duties, would have some vague notion of what
duties he was neglecting. Dickens's attitude is never
irresponsible, still less does he take the money-grubbing Smilesian
line; but at the back of his mind there is usually a half-belief
that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary. Parliament
is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply
Major Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel
Chowser and Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply Bumble
and the Circumlocution Office–and so on and so forth. What he
does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and
Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth
century ARE performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin
would ever bother about.

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great
advantage to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too
much. From Dickens's point of view 'good' society is simply a
collection of village idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs.
Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit
(whose husband was a Powler)! The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is
practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time his
remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic class
incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only succeeds with
this class when he depicts them as mental defectives. The
accusation which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime,
that he 'could not paint a gentleman', was an absurdity, but it is
true in this sense, that what he says against the 'gentleman' class
is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a
wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in HARD
TIMES is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement for
Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's thoughts hardly move outside the
'gentleman' class, but Thackeray has the great advantage of having
a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very similar
to Dickens's. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical
moneyed class against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy.
The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the
nineteenth in the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR is
a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in
LITTLE DORRIT. But by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to
be somewhat nearer to the class he is satirizing. Consequently he
can produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance, Major
Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennis is a shallow old
snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing
wrong in living for years by swindling tradesmen; but what Thackery
realizes is that according to their tortuous code they are neither
of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for
instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would
not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave
well on the field of battle–a thing that would not
particularly appeal to Dickens. The result is that at the end one
is left with a kind of amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and
with something approaching respect for Rawdon; and yet one sees,
better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of
that kind of cadging, toadying life on the fringes of smart
society. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In his hands
both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional caricatures.
And, on the whole, his attacks on 'good' society are rather
perfunctory. The aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his
books chiefly as a kind of 'noises off', a haw-hawing chorus
somewhere in the wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he
produces a really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or
Harold Skimpole, it is generally of some rather middling,
unimportant person.

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering
the time he lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All
peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to
despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the
English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can see this
from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any
foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago,
Froggy, Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser,
Yellowbelly–these are merely a selection. Any time before
1870 the list would have been shorter, because the map of the world
was different from what it is now, and there were only three or
four foreign races that had fully entered into the English
consciousness. But towards these, and especially towards France,
the nearest and best-hated nation, the English attitude of
patronage was so intolerable that English 'arrogance' and
'xenophobia' are still a legend. And of course they are not a
completely untrue legend even now. Till very recently nearly all
English children were brought up to despise the southern European
races, and history as taught in schools was mainly a list of
battles won by England. But one has got to read, say, the QUARTERLY
REVIEW of the thirties to know what boasting really is. Those were
the days when the English built up their legend of themselves as
'sturdy islanders' and 'stubborn hearts of oak' and when it was
accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman was the
equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-century novels
and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the
'Froggy'–a small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a
pointed top-hat, always jabbering and gesticulating, vain,
frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but
generally taking to flight when real danger appears. Over against
him was John Bull, the 'sturdy English yeoman', or (a more
public-school version) the 'strong, silent Englishman' of Charles
Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though
there are moments when he sees through it and laughs at it. The one
historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the
English won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far in his
books without coming upon some reference to it. The English, as he
sees it, are invincible because of their tremendous physical
strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most Englishmen of his
time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger than
other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most
people), and therefore he is capable of writing passages like
this:

I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay
even money that you who are reading this are more than five feet
seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five
feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup
a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a
different and superior animal–a French-beating animal (the
history of hundreds of years has shown you to be so), etc. etc.

There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's
works. Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It
would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at
foreigners, and of course like nearly all nineteenth-century
Englishmen, he is untouched by European culture. But never anywhere
does he indulge in the typical English boasting, the 'island race',
'bulldog breed', 'right little, tight little island' style of talk.
In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES there is not a line that could
be taken as meaning, 'Look how these wicked Frenchmen behave!' The
only place where he seems to display a normal hatred of foreigners
is in the American chapters of MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is
simply the reaction of a generous mind against cant. If Dickens
were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come
back to the book rather like Gide's RETOUR DE L'URSS. But he is
remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as
individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He
does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for
instance, and not because he objects to stock characters and
ready-made jokes, which obviously he does not. It is perhaps more
significant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true
that he takes it for granted (OLIVER TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS)
that a receiver of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time
was probably justified. But the 'Jew joke', endemic in English
literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear in his books,
and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very
convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.

Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a
real largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative,
rather unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an Englishman
but he is hardly aware of it–certainly the thought of being
an Englishman does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings,
no discernible views on foreign politics, and is untouched by the
military tradition. Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small
noncomformist tradesman who looks down on the 'redcoats', and
thinks that war is wicked–a one-eyed view, but after all, war
is wicked. It is noticeable that Dickens hardly writes of war, even
to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description, and
of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a
battle, unless one counts the attack on the Bastille in A TALE OF
TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not strike him as
interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a
place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up
to the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.

III

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of
it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the
special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him
as a 'popular' writer, a champion of the 'oppressed masses'. So he
is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two
things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a
south-of-England man, and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of
touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial
and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how
Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the
spokesman of 'the poor', without showing much awareness of who 'the
poor' really are. To Chesterton 'the poor' means small shopkeepers
and servants. Sam Weller, he says, 'is the great symbol in English
literature of the populace peculiar to England'; and Sam Weller is
a valet! The other point is that Dickens's early experiences have
given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this
unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor,
the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always
full of undisguised repulsion:

The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched;
and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the
whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc.
etc.

There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets
the impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as
being beyond the pale. In rather the same way the modern
doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large block of
the population as 'lumpenproletariat'.

Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one
would expect of him. Although he is well aware of the social and
economic causes of crime, he often seems to feel that when a man
has once broken the law he has put himself outside human society.
There is a chapter at the end of DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David
visits the prison where Latimer and Uriah Heep are serving their
sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard the horrible 'model'
prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his memorable attack
in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He complains that
the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime or the
worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the 'I've always kept
myself respectable' habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously
the attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along
of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude
towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the person who has loaded
him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he
falls into frenzies of disgust. 'The abhorrence in which I held the
man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank
from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible
beast', etc. etc. So far as one can discover from the text, this is
not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by Magwitch
in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a
convict. There is an even more 'kept-myself-respectable' touch in
the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot take
Magwitch's money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has
been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's money and
therefore 'tainted'. There is nothing psychologically false in
this, either. Psychologically the latter part of GREAT EXPECTATIONS
is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of
the book one feels 'Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved.'
But the point is that in the matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies
with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish. The result is
that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as
Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote–characters who are more
pathetic than the author intended.

When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary,
decent, labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous in
Dickens's attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like
the Peggottys and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he
really regards them as equals. It is of the greatest interest to
read Chapter XI of DAVID COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the
autobiographical fragments (parts of this are given in Forster's
LIFE), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about the
blacking-factory episode a great deal more strongly than in the
novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the memory was so
painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid that part
of the Strand. He says that to pass that way 'made me cry, after my
eldest child could speak.' The text makes it quite clear that what
hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced
contact with 'low' associates:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those
of my happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking
warehouse too...I soon became at least as expeditious and as
skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly
familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough
from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the men, always
spoke of me as 'the young gentleman'. A certain man...used to call
me 'Charles' sometimes in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly
when we were very confidential...Poll Green uprose once, and
rebelled against the 'young-gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled
him speedily.

It was as well that there should be 'a space between us', you
see. However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does
not wish to resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived
in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century
class animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but
the surface differences between class and class were enormously
greater. The 'gentleman' and the 'common man' must have seemed like
different species of animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on the side
of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to
impossible for him not to think of a working-class exterior as a
stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a certain
village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his
hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his
palms are soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to
Dickens; all his heroes have soft hands. His younger
heroes–Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester,
David Copperfield, John Harmon–are usually of the type known
as 'walking gentlemen'. He likes a bourgeois exterior and a
bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is
that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak
like a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely
pathetic figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad
accent, but the JEUNE PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of
B.B.C. This is so, even when it involves absurdities. Little Pip,
for instance, is brought up by people speaking broad Essex, but
talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually he
would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs.
Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe,
Oliver Twist–one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even
Rachel in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an
impossibility in her case.

One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real
feelings on the class question is the attitude he takes up when
class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied
about, and consequently it is one of the points at which the
'I'm-not-a-snob' pose tends to break down.

One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is
also a colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial
attitude ('native' women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct)
exists in a veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter
resentment on both sides. When this issue arises, novelists often
revert to crude class-feelings which they might disclaim at other
times. A good example of 'class-conscious' reaction is a rather
forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton. The
author's moral code is quite clearly mixed up with class-hatred. He
feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man to be something
atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite different from her
seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope deals with
this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class
angle. As he sees it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's
daughter is simply an 'entanglement' to be escaped from. Trollope's
moral standards are strict, and he does not allow the seduction
actually to happen, but the implication is always that a
working-class girl's feelings do not greatly matter. In THE THREE
CLERKS he even gives the typical class-reaction by noting that the
girl 'smells'. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING) takes more the
'class-conscious' viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to
hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny Bolton) his attitude is much the same
as Trollope's; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY it is nearer to
Meredith's.

One could divine a great deal about Trollope's social origin, or
Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the
class-sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as
usual, is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the
middle class than with the proletariat. The one incident that seems
to contradict this is the tale of the young peasant-girl in Doctor
Manette's manuscript in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. This, however, is
merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of
Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In
DAVID COPPERFIELD, where he is dealing with a typical
nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to
strike him as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that
sexual misdeeds must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is
drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty,
nor even Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his
offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved
by class-motives, but the Peggottys are not–not even in the
scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if they were, of
course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.

In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene
Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam very realistically and with no appearance
of class bias. According to the 'Unhand me, monster!' tradition,
Lizzie ought either to 'spurn' Eugene or to be ruined by him and
throw herself off Waterloo Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a
heartless betrayer or a hero resolved upon defying society. Neither
behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is frightened by Eugene's
advances and actually runs away from him, but hardly pretends to
dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much decency to
attempt seducing her and dare not marry her because of his family.
Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except Mrs.
Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very
much as it might have happened in real life. But a
'class-conscious' novelist would have given her to Bradley
Headstone.

But when it is the other way about–when it is a case of a
poor man aspiring to some woman who is 'above' him Dickens
instantly retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is rather
fond of the Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital W)
being 'above' a man. Pip feels that Estella is 'above' him, Esther
Summerson is 'above' Guppy, Little Dorrit is 'above' John Chivery,
Lucy Manette is 'above' Sydney Carton. In some of these the
'above'-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social. There is
a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield
discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The
disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with
her:

'Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love
the ground my Agnes walks on.'

I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker
out of the fire, and running him through with it. It went from me
with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of
Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed
animal's, remained in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting all
awry as if his mean soul griped his body) and made me giddy...'I
believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you (David says later
on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as the moon
herself.'

Considering how Heep's general lowness–his servile
manners, dropped aitches and so forth–has been rubbed in
throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature of
Dickens's feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part,
but even villains have sexual lives; it is the thought of the
'pure' Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches that really
revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in love
with a woman who is 'above' him as a joke. It is one of the stock
jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK
HOUSE is an example, John Chivery is another, and there is a rather
ill-natured treatment of this theme in the 'swarry' in PICKWICK
PAPERS. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of
fantasy-life, holding dinner-parties in imitation of their
'betters' and deluding themselves that their young mistresses are
in love with them. This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it
is in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for
a footman even to have delusions of this kind than simply to accept
his status in the spirit of the catechism.

In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his
age. In the nineteenth century the revolt against domestic service
was just beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over
£500 a year. An enormous number of the jokes in
nineteenth-century comic papers deals with the uppishness of
servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of jokes called 'Servant
Gal-isms', all turning on the then astonishing fact that a servant
is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of thing
himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they
are dishonest (GREAT EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID
COPPERFIELD), turn up their noses at good food (PICKWICK PAPERS),
etc. etc.–all rather in the spirit of the suburban housewife
with one downtrodden cook-general. But what is curious, in a
nineteenth-century radical, is that when he wants to draw a
sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is recognizably a
feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all of
them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the 'old family
retainer'; they identify themselves with their master's family and
are at once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No doubt
Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to some extent from
Smollett, and hence from Cervantes; but it is interesting that
Dickens should have been attracted by such a type. Sam Weller's
attitude is definitely medieval. He gets himself arrested in order
to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and afterwards refuses to
get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick still needs his
services. There is a characteristic scene between them:

'Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin',
Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by
you, come what may...'

'My good fellow', said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat
down again, rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, 'you are bound to
consider the young woman also.'

'I do consider the young 'ooman, sir', said Sam. 'I have
considered the young 'ooman. I've spoke to her. I've told her how
I'm sitivated; she's ready to vait till I'm ready, and I believe
she vill. If she don't, she's not the young 'ooman I take her for,
and I give up with readiness.'

It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to
this in real life. But notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is
ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years of his life to his
master, and he can also sit down in his master's presence. A modern
manservant would never think of doing either. Dickens's views on
the servant question do not get much beyond wishing that master and
servant would love one another. Sloppy in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, though
a wretched failure as a character, represents the same kind of
loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of course, is natural, human,
and likeable; but so was feudalism.

What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an
idealized version of the existing thing. He was writing at a time
when domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable
evil. There were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge
inequality of wealth. It was an age of enormous families,
pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the slavey drudging
fourteen hours a day in the basement kitchen was something too
normal to be noticed. And given the FACT of servitude, the feudal
relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller and Mark Tapley
are dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles. If there have got
to be masters and servants, how much better that the master should
be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better still,
of course, if servants did not exist at all–but this Dickens
is probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical
development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens
goes to show that it is not imaginable either.

IV

It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about
agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and
London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the
belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of
people who are deeply civilized but not primarily useful. A thing
that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens's
books is that, as nineteenth-century novelists go, he is rather
ignorant. He knows very little about the way things really happen.
At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue and it needs some
qualification.

Dickens had had vivid glimpses of 'low life'–life in a
debtor's prison, for example–and he was also a popular
novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the
characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century. They
felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays
is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel
about a novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a decade or
so in patient efforts to make contact with the 'common man', his
'common man' finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow
at that. Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind of thing.
He has no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love,
ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not
noticeably write about, however, is work.

In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens
off-stage. The only one of his heroes who has a plausible
profession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer
and then a novelist, like Dickens himself. With most of the others,
the way they earn their living is very much in the background. Pip,
for instance, 'goes into business' in Egypt; we are not told what
business, and Pip's working life occupies about half a page of the
book. Clennam has been in some unspecified business in China, and
later goes into another barely specified business with Doyce;
Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not seem to get much
time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring directly
out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say,
Trollope is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that
Dickens knows very little about the professions his characters are
supposed to follow. What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories?
How did Podsnap make his money? How did Merdle work his swindles?
One knows that Dickens could never follow up the details of
Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange rackets as Trollope
could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or
politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is the
case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have
known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit
in ORLEY FARM, for instance.

And this partly accounts for the needless ramifications of
Dickens's novels, the awful Victorian 'plot'. It is true that not
all his novels are alike in this. A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a very
good and fairly simple story, and so in its different ways is HARD
TIMES; but these are just the two which are always rejected as 'not
like Dickens'–and incidentally they were not published in
monthly numbers. The two first-person novels are also good stories,
apart from their subplots. But the typical Dickens novel, NICHOLAS
NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND,
always exists round a framework of melodrama. The last thing anyone
ever remembers about the books is their central story. On the other
hand, I suppose no one has ever read them without carrying the
memory of individual pages to the day of his death. Dickens sees
human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always
in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of
society; that is to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his
greatest success is The PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a story at
all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at
development–the characters simply go on and on, behaving like
idiots, in a kind of eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his
characters into action, the melodrama begins. He cannot make the
action revolve round their ordinary occupations; hence the
crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues, murders, disguises,
buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. In the end even people
like Squeers and Micawber get sucked into the machinery.

Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague or
merely melodramatic writer. Much that he wrote is extremely
factual, and in the power of evoking visual images he has probably
never been equalled. When Dickens has once described something you
see it for the rest of your life. But in a way the concreteness of
his vision is a sign of what he is missing. For, after all, that is
what the merely casual onlooker always sees–the outward
appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one who
is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape.
Wonderfully as he can describe an APPEARANCE, Dickens does not
often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in
leaving in one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things
seen in leisure moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or
through the windows of a stage-coach; the kind of things he notices
are inn-signs, brass door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of
shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above all, food.
Everything is seen from the consumer-angle. When he writes about
Cokestown he manages to evoke, in just a few paragraphs, the
atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly disgusted southern
visitor would see it. 'It had a black canal in it, and a river that
ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full
of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long,
where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and
down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy
madness.'

That is as near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the
mills. An engineer or a cotton-broker would see it differently; but
then neither of them would be capable of that impressionistic touch
about the heads of the elephants.

In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely
unphysical. He is a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather
than through his hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not so
sedentary as this seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health
and physique, he was active to the point of restlessness;
throughout his life he was a remarkable walker, and he could at any
rate carpenter well enough to put up stage scenery. But he was not
one of those people who feel a need to use their hands. It is
difficult to imagine him digging at a cabbage-patch, for instance.
He gives no evidence of knowing anything about agriculture, and
obviously knows nothing about any kind of game or sport. He has no
interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age in which he
was writing, it is astonishing how little physical brutality there
is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for
instance, behave with the most remarkable mildness towards the
Americans who are constantly menacing them with revolvers and
bowie-knives. The average English or American novelist would have
had them handing out socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots
in all directions. Dickens is too decent for that; he sees the
stupidity of violence, and he also belongs to a cautious urban
class which does not deal in socks on the jaw, even in theory. And
his attitude towards sport is mixed up with social feelings. In
England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport, especially
field-sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. English
Socialists are often flatly incredulous when told that Lenin, for
instance, was devoted to shooting. In their eyes, shooting,
hunting, etc., are simply snobbish observances of the landed
gentry; they forget that these things might appear differently in a
huge virgin country like Russia. From Dickens's point of view
almost any kind of sport is at best a subject for satire.
Consequently one side of nineteenth-century life–the boxing,
racing, cock-fighting, badger-digging, poaching, rat-catching side
of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech's illustrations to
Surtees–is outside his scope.

What is more striking, in a seemingly 'progressive' radical, is
that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in
the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As
Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with
anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by
stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling
that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. LITTLE DORRIT,
written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; GREAT
EXPECTATIONS (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the
twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries
which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph,
the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper)
first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in
his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he
speaks of Doyce's 'invention' in LITTLE DORRIT. It is represented
as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, 'of great
importance to his country and his fellow-creatures', and it is also
an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the
'invention' is! On the other hand, Doyce's physical appearance is
hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of
moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that,
Doyce is firmly anchored in one's memory; but, as usual, Dickens
has done it by fastening on something external.

There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the
mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of
machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little
consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is
usually in terms of MORAL progress–men growing better;
probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their
technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap
between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its
widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone,
but Dickens's unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a
different way. What it does is to make any POSITIVE attitude more
difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past
and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all
that remains is the future (meaning Science, 'progress', and so
forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while
attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of
comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current
educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has
no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not
indicate what a school MIGHT have been? Why did he not have his own
sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending
them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked
that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but
very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon
something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens,
something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote
from us–that he has no idea of work.

With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens
himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central
characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work
in order to make a living and to marry the heroine, not because
they feel a passionate interest in one particular subject. Martin
Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an
architect; he might just as well be a doctor or a barrister. In any
case, in the typical Dickens novel, the DEUS EX MACHINA enters with
a bag of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved from
further struggle. The feeling 'This is what I came into the world
to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it
means starvation', which turns men of differing temperaments into
scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and
revolutionaries–this motif is almost entirely absent from
Dickens's books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave
and believed in his work as few novelists have ever done. But there
seems to be no calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting)
towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all,
it is natural enough, considering his rather negative attitude
towards society. In the last resort there is nothing he admires
except common decency. Science is uninteresting and machinery is
cruel and ugly (the heads of the elephants). Business is only for
ruffians like Bounderby. As for politics–leave that to the
Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective except to marry the
heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind. And you can do
that much better in private life.

Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret
imaginative background. What did he think of as the most desirable
way to live? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle,
when Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John Harman had been
enriched by Boffin what did they DO?

The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby
invested his wife's money with the Cheerybles and 'became a rich
and prosperous merchant', but as he immediately retired into
Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr. and
Mrs. Snodgrass 'purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for
occupation than profit.' That is the spirit in which most of
Dickens's books end–a sort of radiant idleness. Where he
appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse,
Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it
is because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a
burden on somebody else; if you are 'good', and also
self-supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty
years in simply drawing your dividends. Home life is always enough.
And, after all, it was the general assumption of his age. The
'genteel sufficiency', the 'competence', the 'gentleman of
independent means' (or 'in easy circumstances')–the very
phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a
dream of COMPLETE IDLENESS. Charles Reade conveys its spirit
perfectly in the ending of HARD CASH. Alfred Hardie, hero of HARD
CASH, is the typical nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school
style), with gifts which Reade describes as amounting to 'genius'.
He is an old Etonian and a scholar of Oxford, he knows most of the
Greek and Latin classics by heart, he can box with prizefighters
and win the Diamond Sculls at Henley. He goes through incredible
adventures in which, of course, he behaves with faultless heroism,
and then, at the age of twenty-five, he inherits a fortune, marries
his Julia Dodd and settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the
same house as his parents-in-law:

They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred...Oh,
you happy little villa! You were as like Paradise as any mortal
dwelling can be. A day came, however, when your walls could no
longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a
lovely boy; enter two nurses and the villa showed symptoms of
bursting. Two months more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed into
the next villa. It was but twenty yards off; and there was a double
reason for the migration. As often happens after a long separation,
Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant to play
about their knees, etc. etc. etc.

This is the type of the Victorian happy ending–a vision of
a huge, loving family of three or four generations, all crammed
together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed
of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft,
sheltered, effortless life that it implies. It is not even a
violent idleness, like Squire Western's.

That is the significance of Dickens's urban background and his
non interest in the blackguardly-sporting military side of life.
His heroes, once they had come into money and 'settled down', would
not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight
duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would
simply live at home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably
next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life:

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous
merchant, was to buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and
there came gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was
altered and enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled
down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was
any association of bygone times was ever removed or changed.

Within a stone's-throw was another retreat enlivened by
children's pleasant voices too; and here was Kate...the same true,
gentle creature, the same fond sister, the same in the love of all
about her, as in her girlish days.

It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted
from Reade. And evidently this is Dickens's ideal ending. It is
perfectly attained in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT and
PICKWICK, and it is approximated to in varying degrees in almost
all the others. The exceptions are HARD TIMES and GREAT
EXPECTATIONS–the latter actually has a 'happy ending', but it
contradicts the general tendency of the book, and it was put in at
the request of Bulwer Lytton.

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something
like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with
plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children,
and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all,
domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves
of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened.
The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your
feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days,
there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch
and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas
parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever
happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it
is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it
appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.
This alone would be enough to tell one that more than a hundred
years have passed since Dickens's first book was written. No modern
man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.

V

By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read
as far as this, will probably be angry with me.

I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his 'message',
and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer,
especially every novelist, HAS a 'message', whether he admits it or
not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All
art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of
Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the
other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens
is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has
been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by
Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why does
anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?

That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an
aesthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so
corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether
the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In
Dickens's case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He
happens to be one of those 'great authors' who are ladled down
everyone's throat in childhood. At the time this causes rebellion
and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later
life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for
the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a child, 'Ye
Mariners of England', the 'Charge of the Light Brigade' and so
forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the
memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of
association are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two of
his books lying about in an actual majority of English homes. Many
children begin to know his characters by sight before they can even
read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A
thing that is absorbed as early as that does not come up against
any critical judgement. And when one thinks of this, one thinks of
all that is bad and silly in Dickens–the cast-iron 'plots',
the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the paragraphs in
blank verse, the awful pages of 'pathos'. And then the thought
arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply mean that I like
thinking about my childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution?

If so, he is an institution that there is no getting away from.
How often one really thinks about any writer, even a writer one
cares for, is a difficult thing to decide; but I should doubt
whether anyone who has actually read Dickens can go a week without
remembering him in one context or another. Whether you approve of
him or not, he is THERE, like the Nelson Column. At any moment some
scene or character, which may come from some book you cannot even
remember the name of, is liable to drop into your mind. Micawber's
letters! Winkle in the witness-box! Mrs. Gamp! Mrs. Wititterly and
Sir Tumley Snuffim! Todgers's! (George Gissing said that when he
passed the Monument it was never of the Fire of London that he
thought, always of Todgers's.) Mrs. Leo Hunter! Squeers! Silas Wegg
and the Decline and Fall-off of the Russian Empire! Miss Mills and
the Desert of Sahara! Wopsle acting Hamlet! Mrs. Jellyby!
Mantalini, Jerry Cruncher, Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman,
Skimpole, Joe Gargery, Pecksniff–and so it goes on and on. It
is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world. And not
a purely comic world either, for part of what one remembers in
Dickens is his Victorian morbidness and necrophilia and the
blood-and-thunder scenes–the death of Sykes, Krook's
spontaneous combustion, Fagin in the condemned cell, the women
knitting round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this has
entered even into the minds of people who do not care about it. A
music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite recently) go on
the stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs. Gamp with a fair
certainty of being understood, although not one in twenty of the
audience had ever read a book of Dickens's right through. Even
people who affect to despise him quote him unconsciously.

Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point.
In genuinely popular literature–for instance, the Elephant
and Castle version of SWEENY TODD–he has been plagiarized
quite shamelessly. What has been imitated, however, is simply a
tradition that Dickens himself took from earlier novelists and
developed, the cult of 'character', i.e. eccentricity. The thing
that cannot be imitated is his fertility of invention, which is
invention not so much of characters, still less of 'situations', as
of turns of phrase and concrete details. The outstanding,
unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the UNNECESSARY DETAIL.
Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not
particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as
individual as a fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer's
party, is telling the story of the child who swallowed its sister's
necklace:

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he
treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had
got through the necklace–five-and-twenty beads in all. The
sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a
bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace;
looked high and low for it; but I needn't say, didn't find it. A
few days afterwards, the family were at dinner–baked shoulder
of mutton and potatoes under it–the child, who wasn't hungry,
was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a
noise, like a small hailstorm. 'Don't do that, my boy', says the
father. 'I ain't a-doin' nothing', said the child. 'Well, don't do
it again', said the father. There was a short silence, and then the
noise began again, worse than ever. 'If you don't mind what I say,
my boy', said the father, 'you'll find yourself in bed, in
something less than a pig's whisper.' He gave the child a shake to
make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard
before. 'Why dam' me, it's IN the child', said the father; 'he's
got the croup in the wrong place!' 'No, I haven't, father', said
the child, beginning to cry, 'it's the necklace; I swallowed it,
father.' The father caught the child up, and ran with him to the
hospital, the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with
the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the
cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. 'He's in the
hospital now', said Jack Hopkins, 'and he makes such a devil of a
noise when he walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a
watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients.'

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century
comic paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that
nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton
and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer
is that it doesn't. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid
little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these
squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created. The other
thing one would notice here is that Dickens's way of telling a
story takes a long time. An interesting example, too long to quote,
is Sam Weller's story of the obstinate patient in Chapter XLIV of
THE PICKWICK PAPERS. As it happens, we have a standard of
comparison here, because Dickens is plagiarizing, consciously or
unconsciously. The story is also told by some ancient Greek writer.
I cannot now find the passage, but I read it years ago as a boy at
school, and it runs more or less like this:

A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by
his physician that if he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him.
The Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of wine and immediately
jumped off the house-top and perished. 'For', said he, 'in this way
I shall prove that the wine did not kill me.'

As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story–about six
lines. As Sam Weller tells it, it takes round about a thousand
words. Long before getting to the point we have been told all about
the patient's clothes, his meals, his manners, even the newspapers
he reads, and about the peculiar construction of the doctor's
carriage, which conceals the fact that the coachman's trousers do
not match his coat. Then there is the dialogue between the doctor
and the patient. ''Crumpets is wholesome, sir,' said the patient.
'Crumpets is NOT wholesome, sir,' says the doctor, wery fierce,'
etc., etc. In the end the original story had been buried under the
details. And in all of Dickens's most characteristic passages it is
the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of
weed. Squeers stands up to address his boys, and immediately we are
hearing about Bolder's father who was two pounds ten short, and
Mobbs's stepmother who took to her bed on hearing that Mobbs
wouldn't eat fat and hoped Mr. Squeers would flog him into a
happier state of mind. Mrs. Leo Hunter writes a poem, 'Expiring
Frog'; two full stanzas are given. Boffin takes a fancy to pose as
a miser, and instantly we are down among the squalid biographies of
eighteenth-century misers, with names like Vulture Hopkins and the
Rev. Blewberry Jones, and chapter headings like 'The Story of the
Mutton Pies' and 'The Treasures of a Dunghill'. Mrs. Harris, who
does not even exist, has more detail piled on to her than any three
characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle of a sentence
we learn, for instance, that her infant nephew has been seen in a
bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with the pink-eyed lady, the
Prussian dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe Gargery describes how
the robbers broke into the house of Pumblechook, the corn and seed
merchant–'and they took his till, and they took his cashbox,
and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles, and
they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
up to his bedpost, and they give him a dozen, and they stuffed his
mouth full of flowering annuals to prevent his crying out.' Once
again the unmistakable Dickens touch, the flowering annuals; but
any other novelist would only have mentioned about half of these
outrages. Everything is piled up and up, detail on detail,
embroidery on embroidery. It is futile to object that this kind of
thing is rococo–one might as well make the same objection to
a wedding-cake. Either you like it or you do not like it. Other
nineteenth-century writers, Surtees, Barham, Thackeray, even
Marryat, have something of Dickens's profuse, overflowing quality,
but none of them on anything like the same scale. The appeal of all
these writers now depends partly on period-flavour and though
Marryat is still officially a 'boy's writer' and Surtees has a sort
of legendary fame among hunting men, it is probable that they are
read mostly by bookish people.

Significantly, Dickens's most successful books (not his BEST
books) are THE PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a novel, and HARD
TIMES and A TALE OF TWO CITIES, which are not funny. As a novelist
his natural fertility greatly hampers him, because the burlesque
which he is never able to resist, is constantly breaking into what
ought to be serious situations. There is a good example of this in
the opening chapter of GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The escaped convict,
Magwitch, has just captured the six-year-old Pip in the churchyard.
The scene starts terrifyingly enough, from Pip's point of view. The
convict, smothered in mud and with his chain trailing from his leg,
suddenly starts up among the tombs, grabs the child, turns him
upside down and robs his pockets. Then he begins terrorizing him
into bringing foal and a file:

He held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the
stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

'You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them
wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder.
You do it and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign
concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person
sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my
words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart
and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone,
as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in
comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears
the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to
himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.
It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young
man. A boy may lock his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself
up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself
comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep his way
to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from harming
you at the present moment, but with great difficulty. I find it
wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do
you say?'

Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no
starving and hunted man would speak in the least like that.
Moreover, although the speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the
way in which a child's mind works, its actual words are quite out
of tune with what is to follow. It turns Magwitch into a sort of
pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through the child's
eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book he is to be
represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on which the
plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As
usual, Dickens's imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque
details were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are
more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some
seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of
ending David Copperfield's lessons every morning with a dreadful
sum in arithmetic. 'If I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy
four thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny
each, present payment', it always begins. Once again the typical
Dickens detail, the double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too
human a touch for Murdstone; he would have made it five thousand
cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of the novel
suffers. Not that it matters very much, because Dickens is
obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is
all fragments, all details–rotten architecture, but wonderful
gargoyles–and never better than when he is building up some
character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes
his characters behave inconsistently. Generally he is accused of
doing just the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere
'types', each crudely representing some single trait and fitted
with a kind of label by which you recognize him. Dickens is 'only a
caricaturist'–that is the usual accusation, and it does him
both more and less than justice. To begin with, he did not think of
himself as a caricaturist, and was constantly setting into action
characters who ought to have been purely static. Squeers, Micawber,
Miss Mowcher,[Note, below] Wegg, Skimpole, Pecksniff and many
others are finally involved in 'plots' where they are out of place
and where they behave quite incredibly. They start off as
magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a
third-rate movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger on a single
sentence in which the original illusion is destroyed. There is such
a sentence in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After the famous dinner-party (the
one where the leg of mutton was underdone), David is showing his
guests out. He stops Traddles at the top of the stairs:

[Note: Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine
because the real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier
chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play
a villainous part. But ANY action by such a character would seem
incongruous. (Author's footnote)]

'Traddles', said I, 'Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor
fellow: but if I were you I wouldn't lend him anything.'

At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little though
something of the kind was inevitable sooner or later. The story is
a fairly realistic one, and David is growing up; ultimately he is
bound to see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel.
Afterwards, of course, Dickens's sentimentality overcomes him and
Micawber is made to turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the
original Micawber is never quite recaptured, in spite of desperate
efforts. As a rule, the 'plot' in which Dickens's characters get
entangled is not particularly credible, but at least it makes some
pretence at reality, whereas the world to which they belong is a
never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just here one sees that
'only a caricaturist' is not really a condemnation. The fact that
Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was
constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark
of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still
remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in
would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that
nothing that comes afterwards effaces it. As with the people one
knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one
particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is
always ladling out brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always
weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband's head against
the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracts while her
children fall into the area–and there they all are, fixed up
for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids,
completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and
infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists.
Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally
artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he 'chose to work in a circle of
stage fire.' His characters are even more distorted and simplified
than Smollett's. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for
any work of art there is only one test worth bothering
about–survival. By this test Dickens's characters have
succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of
them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they
exist.

But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about
monsters. It amounts to this, that it is only certain moods that
Dickens can speak to. There are large areas of the human mind that
he never touches. There is no poetic feeling anywhere in his books,
and no genuine tragedy, and even sexual love is almost outside his
scope. Actually his books are not so sexless as they are sometimes
declared to be, and considering the time in which he was writing,
he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace in him of the
feeling that one finds in MANON LESCAUT, SALAMMBÔ, CARMEN,
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once
said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is
true of Dickens. There are whole worlds which he either knows
nothing about or does not wish to mention. Except in a rather
roundabout way, one cannot learn very much from Dickens. And to say
this is to think almost immediately of the great Russian novelists
of the nineteenth century. Why is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to
be so much larger than Dickens's–why is it that he seems able
to tell you so much more ABOUT YOURSELF? It is not that he is more
gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is
because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters
are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens's are already
finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's people are present
far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy's, but always in a
single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture.
You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character
as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely
because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic
characters that you can imagine yourself talking to–Bloom,
for instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells's Mr. Polly. It is because
Dickens's characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the
thing that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as
talking about anything else. They never learn, never speculate.
Perhaps the most meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and
his thoughts are mush. Does this mean that Tolstoy's novels are
'better' than Dickens's? The truth is that it is absurd to make
such comparisons in terms of 'better' and 'worse'. If I were forced
to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that Tolstoy's appeal
will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely
intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other
hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not.
Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens can be portrayed
on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between
them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes barely
intersect.

VI

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that
no one would now remember his name. Or at best a few of his books
would survive in rather the same way as books like FRANK FAIRLEIGH,
MR. VERDANT GREEN and MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES, as a sort of
hangover of the Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant little whiff of
oysters and brown stout. Who has not felt sometimes that it was 'a
pity' that Dickens ever deserted the vein of PICKWICK for things
like LITTLE DORRIT and HARD TIMES? What people always demand of a
popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over
again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice
could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly
lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is
implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid
competence of DUBLINERS and end with the dream-language of
FINNEGAN'S WAKE, but ULYSSES and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST are part of
the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of
art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused
us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the
consciousness of 'having something to say'. He is always preaching
a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For
you can only create if you can CARE. Types like Squeers and
Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for
something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an
idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to
go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and
authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room
for one more custard pie.

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows
that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist
and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a
clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an
emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally
say is, 'Behave decently', which, as I suggested earlier, is not
necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are
potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put
right by altering the SHAPE of society; once that change is
effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of
his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out
against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it,
'an expression on the human face.' Roughly speaking, his morality
is the Christian morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing
he was essentially a Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain
when writing his will. In any case he cannot properly be described
as a religious man. He 'believed', undoubtedly, but religion in the
devotional sense does not seem to have entered much into his
thoughts [Note, below]. Where he is Christian is in his
quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors.
As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and
everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to
change sides when the underdog becomes an upper-dog, and in fact
Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the Catholic Church, for
instance, but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted (BARNABY
RUDGE) he is on their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even
more, but as soon as they are really overthrown (the revolutionary
chapters in A TALE OF TWO CITIES) his sympathies swing round.
Whenever he departs from this emotional attitude he goes astray. A
well-known example is at the ending of DAVID COPPERFIELD, in which
everyone who reads it feels that something has gone wrong. What is
wrong is that the closing chapters are pervaded, faintly but not
noticeably, by the cult of success. It is the gospel according to
Smiles, instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The attractive,
out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a fortune,
Heep gets into prison–both of these events are flagrantly
impossible–and even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes.
If you like, you can read Dora as Dickens's wife and Agnes as his
sister-in-law, but the essential point is that Dickens has 'turned
respectable' and done violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is
why Agnes is the most disagreeable of his heroines, the real
legless angel of Victorian romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's
Laura.

[Note: From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): 'You will
remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious
observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to
weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to
form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the
better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and
beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself,
and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but
heartily respect it...Never abandon the wholesome practice of
saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never
abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.' (Author's
footnote)]

No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his
limitations, and yet there does remain his native generosity of
mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always keeps him
where he belongs. It is probably the central secret of his
popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism rather of Dickens's type
is one of the marks of Western popular culture. One sees it in
folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey Mouse
and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the
Giant-killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the
popular protests (always ineffective but not always a sham) against
imperialism, in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive
damages when a rich man's car runs over a poor man; it is the
feeling that one is always on the wrong side of the underdog, on
the side of the weak against the strong. In one sense it is a
feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common man is still
living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern
intellectual has gone over to some or other form of
totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly
all that Dickens stands for can be written off as 'bourgeois
morality'. But in moral outlook no one could be more 'bourgeois'
than the English working classes. The ordinary people in the
Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of
'realism' and power-politics. They may do so before long, in which
case Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-horse. But in his
own age and ours he has been popular chiefly because he was able to
express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the
native decency of the common man. And it is important that from
this point of view people of very different types can be described
as 'common'. In a country like England, in spite of its
class-structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All
through the Christian ages, and especially since the French
Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of
freedom and equality; it is only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to
all ranks of society. The most atrocious injustices, cruelties,
lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are not many people
who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a
Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense
of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly
everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally
to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was
and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate
it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read
by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist
of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has
the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is
not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very
strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal,
Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what
these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is
the face that the writer OUGHT to have. Well, in the case of
Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's
photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of
about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing,
with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no
malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against
something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the
face of a man who is GENEROUSLY ANGRY–in other words, of a
nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with
equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now
contending for our souls.

CHARLES READE (1940)

Since Charles Reade's books are published in cheap editions one
can assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to
meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name
seems to evoke, at most, a vague memory of 'doing' THE CLOISTER AND
THE HEARTH as a school holiday task. It is his bad luck to be
remembered by this particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to
the films, is chiefly remembered by A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING
ARTHUR'S COURT. Reade wrote several dull books, and THE CLOISTER
AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote three novels which
I personally would back to outlive the entire works of Meredith and
George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such as A
JACK OF ALL TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.

What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm
as one finds in R. Austin Freeman's detective stories or
Lieutenant-Commander Gould's collections of curiosities–the
charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call
penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of
disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him
to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels. If you
have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists,
catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop
windows and back numbers of the EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of mind
that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just
what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then
you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not
see his work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy
and compiled his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the
strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he would
have regarded as his 'purpose'. For he was a social reformer in a
fragmentary way, and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as
blood-letting, the treadmill, private asylums, clerical celibacy
and tight-lacing.

My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens
is not an attack on anything in particular. Like most
nineteenth-century novels FOUL PLAY is too complicated to be
summarized, but its central story is that of a young clergyman,
Robert Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of forgery, is
transported to Australia, absconds in disguise, and is wrecked on a
desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course, Reade is
in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best fitted
to write a desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of
course, are worse than others, but none is altogether bad when it
sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep
alive. A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is
probably the surest winner in fiction, surer even than a trial
scene. Nearly thirty years after reading the book I can still
remember more or less exactly what things the three heroes of
Ballantyne's CORAL ISLAND possessed between them. (A telescope, six
yards of whipcord, a penknife, a brass ring and a piece of hoop
iron.) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so unreadable as a
whole that few people even know that the second part exists,
becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe's efforts to make a
table, glaze earthenware and grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however,
was an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he was very well up
in the geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of
man who would have been at home on a desert island himself. He
would never, like Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem
as that of leavening bread and, unlike Ballantyne, he knew that
civilized men cannot make fire by rubbing sticks together.

The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade's heroes, is a kind of
superman. He is hero, saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist,
navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith and carpenter all
rolled into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that
Reade honestly imagined to be the normal product of an English
university. Needless to say, it is only a month or two before this
wonderful clergyman has got the desert island running like a West
End hotel. Even before reaching the island, when the last survivors
of the wrecked ship are dying of thirst in an open boat, he has
shown his ingenuity by constructing a distilling apparatus with a
jar, a hot-water bottle and a piece of tubing. But his best stroke
of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island. He
himself, with a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain,
but the heroine, Helen Rollestone, who has no idea that he is a
convict, is naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to turn
his 'great mind' to this problem. The first difficulty, of course,
is to discover exactly where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen
is still wearing her watch, which is still keeping Sydney time. By
fixing a stick in the ground and watching its shadow Robert notes
the exact moment of noon, after which it is a simple matter to work
out the longitude–for naturally a man of his calibre would
know the longitude of Sydney. It is equally natural that he can
determine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of the
vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the
outside world. After some thought Robert writes a series of
messages on pieces of parchment made from seals' bladders, with ink
obtained from cochineal insects. He has noticed that migrant birds
often use the island as a stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as
the likeliest messengers, because every duck is liable to be shot
sooner or later. By a stratagem often used in India he captures a
number of ducks, ties a message to each of their legs and lets them
go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks takes refuge on a ship,
and the couple are rescued, but even then the story is barely half
finished. There follow enormous ramifications, plots and
counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.

In any of Reade's three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT
IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole
interest is in the technical detail. His power of descriptive
writing, especially of describing violent action, is also very
striking, and on a serial-story level he is a wonderful contriver
of plots. Simply as a novelist it is impossible to take him
seriously, because he has no sense whatever of character or of
probability, but he himself had the advantage of believing in even
the absurdest details of his own stories. He wrote of life as he
saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same way: that is, as a
series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time.
Of all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable,
he is perhaps the only one who is completely in tune with his own
age. For all his unconventionality, his 'purpose', his eagerness to
expose abuses, he never makes a fundamental criticism. Save for a
few surface evils he sees nothing wrong in an acquisitive society,
with its equation of money and virtue, its pious millionaires and
erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing gives one his measure better
than the fact that in introducing Robert Penfold, at the beginning
of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar and a cricketer and
only thirdly and almost casually adds that he is a priest.

That is not to say that Reade's social conscience was not sound
so far as it went, and in several minor ways he probably helped to
educate public opinion. His attack on the prison system in IT IS
NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND is relevant to this day, or was so till very
recently, and in his medical theories he is said to have been a
long way ahead of his time. What he lacked was any notion that the
early railway age, with the special scheme of values appropriate to
it, was not going to last for ever. This is a little surprising
when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood Reade.
However hastily and unbalanced Winwood Reade's MARTYRDOM OF MAN may
seem now, it is a book that shows an astonishing width of vision,
and it is probably the unacknowledged grandparent of the 'outlines'
so popular today. Charles Reade might have written an 'outline' of
phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of
human history. He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little
more conscience than most, a scholar who happened to prefer popular
science to the classics. Just for that reason he is one of the best
'escape' novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be good
books to send to a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare,
for instance. There are no problems in them, no genuine 'messages',
merely the fascination of a gifted mind functioning within very
narrow limits, and offering as complete a detachment from real life
as a game of chess or a jigsaw puzzle.

INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)

I

When Henry Miller's novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935,
it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned
in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the
people who praised it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous
Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra Pound–on the whole, not the
writers who are in fashion at this moment. And in fact the subject
matter of the book, and to a certain extent its mental atmosphere,
belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.

TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or
autobiography in the form of a novel, whichever way you like to
look at it. Miller himself insists that it is straight
autobiography, but the tempo and method of telling the story are
those of a novel. It is a story of the American Paris, but not
along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who figure in it
happen to be people without money. During the boom years, when
dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low,
Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students,
dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world
has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called
artists must actually have outnumbered the working
population–indeed, it has been reckoned that in the late
twenties there were as many as 30,000 painters in Paris, most of
them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists that
gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian
or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a
glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost
impossible to pick one's way between the sketching-stools. It was
the age of dark horses and neglected genii; the phrase on
everybody's lips was 'QUAND JE SERAI LANCÉ'. As it turned
out, nobody was 'LANCÉ', the slump descended like another
Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge
Montparnasse cafés which only ten years ago were filled till
the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into
darkened tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this
world–described in, among other novels, Wyndham Lewis's
TARR–that Miller is writing about, but he is dealing only
with the under side of it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has
been able to survive the slump because it is composed partly of
genuine artists and partly of genuine scoundrels. The neglected
genii, the paranoiacs who art always 'going to' write the novel
that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are there, but they are
only genii in the rather rare moments when they are not scouting
about for the next meal. For the most part it is a story of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men's hotels, of fights, drinking
bouts, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and
temporary jobs. And the whole atmosphere of the poor quarters of
Paris as a foreigner sees them–the cobbled alleys, the sour
reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and
worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks
of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar
sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to
pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens–it is all
there, or at any rate the feeling of it is there.

On the face of it no material could be less promising. When
TROPIC OF CANCER was published the Italians were marching into
Abyssinia and Hitler's concentration camps were already bulging.
The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin.
It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding
value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging
drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a novelist is not obliged to
write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who
simply disregards the major public events of the moment is
generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere account of
the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most people would probably
assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over
from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at
once that it was nothing of the kind, but a very remarkable book.
How or why remarkable? That question is never easy to answer. It is
better to begin by describing the impression that TROPIC OF CANCER
has left on my own mind.

When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of
unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be
impressed. Most people's would be the same, I believe.
Nevertheless, after a lapse of time the atmosphere of the book,
besides innumerable details, seemed to linger in my memory in a
peculiar way. A year later Miller's second book, BLACK SPRING, was
published. By this time? TROPIC OF CANCER was much more vividly
present in my mind than it had been when I first read it. My first
feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it
is a fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet
after another year there were many passages in BLACK SPRING that
had also rooted themselves in my memory. Evidently these books are
of the sort to leave a flavour behind them–books that 'create
a world of their own', as the saying goes. The books that do this
are not necessarily good books, they may be good bad books like
RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES stories, or perverse and morbid
books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS.
But now and again there appears a novel which opens up a new world
not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is
familiar. The truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance,
is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much
more in ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also
an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the
familiar on to paper. He dared–for it is a matter of DARING
just as much as of technique–to expose the imbecilities of
the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was
under everybody's nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you
supposed to be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has
managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate
momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you
read certain passages in ULYSSES you feel that Joyce's mind and
your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never
heard your name, that there some world outside time and space in
which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble
Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry
Miller. Not everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and
sometimes, especially in BLACK SPRING, tends to slide away into
more verbiage or into the squashy universe of the surrealists. But
read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar
relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being
UNDERSTOOD. 'He knows all about me,' you feel; 'he wrote this
specially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking
to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral
purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For
the moment you have got away from the lies and simplifications, the
stylized, marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite
good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable experiences of
human beings.

But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller
is writing about the man in the street, and it is incidentally
rather a pity that it should be a street full of brothers. That is
the penalty of leaving your native land. It means transferring your
roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a
novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to
take him out of contact with working life and narrow down his range
to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel and the studio. On
the whole, in Miller's books you are reading about people living
the expatriate life, people drinking, talking, meditating, and
fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and bringing up
children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of
activities as well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a
wonderful flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New
York of the O. Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the best,
and, granted their utter worthlessness as social types, the drunks
and dead-beats of the cafes are handled with a feeling for
character and a mastery of technique that are unapproached in any
at all recent novel. All of them are not only credible but
completely familiar; you have the feeling that all their adventures
have happened to yourself. Not that they are anything very
startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a
melancholy Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French
school during a cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid,
goes on drinking bouts in Le Havre with his friend Collins, the sea
captain, goes to the brothels where there are wonderful Negresses,
talks with his friend Van Norden, the novelist, who has got the
great novel of the world in his head but can never bring himself to
begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the verge of starvation, is
picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry him. There are
interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to
decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman.
In great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went
to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected
to urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of
torment etc., etc. And after all, none of it is true, the widow
doesn't even exist–Karl has simply invented her in order to
make himself seem important. The whole book is in this vein, more
or less. Why is it that these monstrous trivialities are so
engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is deeply familiar,
because you have all the while the feeling that these things are
happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody has
chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag
the REAL-POLITIK of the inner mind into the open. In Miller's case
it is not so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the
mind as of owning up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For
the truth is that many ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority,
do speak and behave in just the way that is recorded here. The
callous coarseness with which the characters in TROPIC OF CANCER
talk is very rare in fiction, but it is extremely common in real
life; again and again I have heard just such conversations from
people who were not even aware that they were talking coarsely. It
is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is not a young man's book.
Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though since
then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this
first book had been lived with for years. It is one of those books
that are slowly matured in poverty and obscurity, by people who
know what they have got to do and therefore are able to wait. The
prose is astonishing, and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better.
Unfortunately I cannot quote; unprintable words occur almost
everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC OF CANCER, get hold of BLACK
SPRING and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you
an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with
English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language,
but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the
unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its
ten years' exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with
rhythms in it, something quite different from the flat cautious
statements and snack-bar dialects that are now in fashion.

When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural
that the first thing people notice should be its obscenity. Given
our current notions of literary decency, it is not at all easy to
approach an unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked
and disgusted, or one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined
above all else not to be impressed. The last is probably the
commonest reaction, with the result that unprintable books often
get less attention than they deserve. It is rather the fashion to
say that nothing is easier than to write an obscene book, that
people only do it in order to get themselves talked about and make
money, etc., etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case
is that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are
distinctly uncommon. If there were easy money to be made out of
dirty words, a lot more people would be making it. But, because
'obscene' books do not appear very frequently, there is a tendency
to lump them together, as a rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF
CANCER has been vaguely associated with two other books, ULYSSES
and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, but in neither case is there much
resemblance. What Miller has in common with Joyce is a willingness
to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday life. Putting aside
differences of technique, the funeral scene in ULYSSES, for
instance, would fit into TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter is a
sort of confession, an exposé of the frightful inner
callousness of the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As
a novel, TROPIC OF CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an
artist, in a sense in which Miller is not and probably would not
wish to be, and in any case he is attempting much more. He is
exploring different states of consciousness, dream, reverie (the
'bronze-by-gold' chapter), drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing them
all into a huge complex pattern, almost like a Victorian 'plot'.
Miller is simply a hard-boiled person talking about life, an
ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift
for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks exactly like
everyone's idea of an American businessman. As for the comparison
with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, it is even further from the point.
Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some sense
autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a
book-with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the
horror and meaninglessness of modern life–actually, indeed,
of LIFE. It is a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the
cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is almost exactly the opposite. The
thing has become so unusual as to seem almost anomalous, but it is
the book of a man who is happy. So is BLACK SPRING, though slightly
less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia. With years of
lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage, dirt,
failure, nights in the open, battles with immigration officers,
endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller finds that he is
enjoying himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel
Céline with horror are the ones that appeal to him. So far
from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the very word 'acceptance'
calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt Whitman.

But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the
nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were
alive at the moment he would write anything in the least degree
resembling LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is 'I
accept', and there is a radical difference between acceptance now
and acceptance then. Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled
prosperity, but more than that, he was writing in a country where
freedom was something more than a word. The democracy, equality,
and comradeship that he is always talking about arc not remote
ideals, but something that existed in front of his eyes. In
mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and equal,
WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a society
of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class
distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently
submerged class. Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the
knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without
bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain's Mississippi raftsmen
and pilots, or Bret Harte's Western gold-miners, they seem more
remote than the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply
that they are free human beings. But it is the same even with the
peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America of
the LITTLE WOMEN, HELEN'S BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life
has a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like
a physical sensation in your belly. If is this that Whitman is
celebrating, though actually he does it very badly, because he is
one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of
making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too
early to see the deterioration in American life that came with the
rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant
labour.

Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly
everyone who has read him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER
ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the
lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the
imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing
past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of thing-as-it-is. Only,
what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the
ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed
through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of
expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and
regimentation. To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say
that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler,
Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches,
purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies,
PROVOCATEURS, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood
films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course,
but, those things among-others. And on the whole this is Henry
Miller's attitude. Not quite always, because at moments he shows
signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. There is a
long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of the
Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most remarkable
pieces of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude
not very different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE WHITE
PHAGOCYTES there is an attack on modern American civilization
(breakfast cereals, cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the
literary man who hates industrialism. But in general the attitude
is 'Let's swallow it whole'. And hence the seeming preoccupation
with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is
only seeming, for the truth is that ordinary everyday life consists
far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to
admit. Whitman himself 'accepted' a great deal that his
contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of
the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the
shattered skull of the suicide, the 'grey sick faces of onanists',
etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western
Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which
Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world.
The 'democratic vistas' have ended in barbed wire. There is less
feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the
cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot,
endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically
means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and
become a passive attitude–even 'decadent', if that word means
anything.

But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to
experience. Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than
is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also
passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade
union or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but
against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So
far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down
and lets things happen to him. During the past ten years literature
has involved itself more and more deeply in politics, with the
result that there is now less room in it for the ordinary man than
at any time during the past two centuries. One can see the change
in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written
about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of
1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war
books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking
dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost
all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political
angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think, whereas the
books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior
officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole
thing was about. Books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU,
A FAREWELL TO ARMS, DEATH OF A HERO, GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS
OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON THE SOMME were written
not by propagandists but by VICTIMS. They are saying in effect,
'What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can do is to
endure.' And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the whole,
about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller's attitude than the
omniscience which is now fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived
periodical of which he was part-editor, used to describe itself in
its advertisements as 'non-political, non-educational,
non-progressive, non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary,
non-consistent, non-contemporary', and Miller's own work could be
described in nearly the same terms. It is a voice from the crowd,
from the underling, from the third-class carriage, from the
ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man.

I have been using the phrase 'ordinary man' rather loosely, and
I have taken it for granted that the 'ordinary man' exists, a thing
now denied by some people. I do not mean that the people Miller is
writing about constitute a majority, still less that he is writing
about proletarians. No English or American novelist has as yet
seriously attempted that. And again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER
fall short of being ordinary to the extent that they are idle,
disreputable, and more or less 'artistic'. As I have said already,
this a pity, but it is the necessary result of expatriation.
Miller's 'ordinary man' is neither the manual worker nor the
suburban householder, but the derelict, the DÉCLASSÉ,
the adventurer, the American intellectual without roots and without
money. Still, the experiences even of this type overlap fairly
widely with those of more normal people. Milter has been able to
get the most out of his rather limited material because he has had
the courage to identify with it. The ordinary man, the 'average
sensual man', has been given the power of speech, like Balaam's
ass.

It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any
rate out of fashion. The average sensual man is out of fashion.
Preoccupation with sex and truthfulness about the inner life are
out of fashion. American Paris is out of fashion. A book like
TROPIC OF CANCER, published at such a time, must be either a
tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I think a majority of
the people who have read it would agree that it is not the first.
It is worth trying to discover just what, this escape from the
current literary fashion means. But to do that one has got to see
it against its background–that is, against the general
development of English literature in the twenty years since the
Great War.

II

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically
always means that he is admired by people under thirty. At the
beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years during and
immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon
the thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who
were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence
which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In
1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of the
SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the
SHROPSHIRE LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and
more or less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and
even glanced into it; it might strike him as cheaply
clever–probably that would be about all. Yet these are the
poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves,
over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier generations
had recited Meredith's 'Love in a Valley', Swinburne's 'Garden of
Proserpine' etc., etc.

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a roselipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The roselipt girls arc sleeping
In fields Where roses fade.

It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does
the bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take
account of the EXTERNAL conditions that make certain writers
popular at certain times. Housman's poems had not attracted much
notice when they were first published. What was there in them that
appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born
round about 1900?

In the first place, Housman is a 'country' poet. His poems are
full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names,
Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, 'on Wenlock Edge', 'in
summer time on Bredon', thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies,
the wild jonquils in the pastures, the 'blue, remembered hills'.
War poems apart, English verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly
'country'. The reason no doubt was that the RENTIER-professional
class was ceasing once and for all to have any real relationship
with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than
now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country and despising
the town. England at that time was hardly more an agricultural
country than it is now, but before the light industries began to
spread themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most
middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it
was the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to
them–the ploughing, harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth.
Unless he has to do it himself a boy is not likely to notice the
horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip, milking cows with chapped teats
at four o'clock in the morning, etc., etc. Just before, just after,
and for that matter, during the war was the great age of the
'Nature poet', the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson.
Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester', the star poem of 1913, is nothing
but an enormous gush of 'country' sentiment, a sort of accumulated
vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem
'Grantchester' is something worse than worthless, but as an
illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period
FELT it is a valuable document.

Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the
week-ending spirit of Brooke and the others. The 'country' motif is
there all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the poems
have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in reality
Strephon or Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep
appeal. Experience shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading
about rustics (key-phrase, 'close to the soil') because they
imagine them to be more primitive and passionate than themselves.
Hence the 'dark earth' novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that
time a middle-class boy, with his 'country' bias, would identify
with an agricultural worker as he would never have done with a town
worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of an idealized
ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a
wild, free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring,
cockfighting, horses, beer, and women. Masefield's 'Everlasting
Mercy', another valuable period-piece, immensely popular with boys
round about the war years, gives you this vision in a very crude
form. But Housman's Maurices and Terences could be taken seriously
where Masefield's Saul Kane could not; on this side of him, Housman
was Masefield with a dash of Theocritus. Moreover all his themes
are adolescent–murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death.
They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the
feeling of being up against the 'bedrock facts' of life:

The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood has dried;
And Maurice among the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.

And again:

They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail
And whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men who die at morn.

It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes
unstuck. 'Ned lies long in the churchyard and Tom lies long in
jail'. And notice also the exquisite self-pity–the 'nobody
loves me' feeling:

The diamond drops adorning
The low mound on the lea,
These arc the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.

Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written
expressly for adolescents. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the
girl always dies or marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to
boys who were herded together in public schools and were
half-inclined to think of women as something unattainable. Whether
Housman ever had the same appeal for girls I doubt. In his poems
the woman's point of view is not considered, she is merely the
nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature who leads you
a little distance and then gives you the slip.

But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who
were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him,
and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, 'cynical' strain. The
fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally
bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war
itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian
Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at
about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in
England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose
ideas were formed in the eighties or earlier had carried them quite
unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the
younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were
dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for
instance, was spectacular. For several years the old-young
antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the
war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders
still bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger
generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded celibate
schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his
implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God. He
was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to
the tune of red coats and 'God save the Queen' rather than steel
helmets and 'Hang the Kaiser'. And he was satisfyingly
anti-Christian–he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant
paganism, the conviction that life is short and the gods are
against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young;
and all in charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely
of words of one syllable.

It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were
merely a propagandist, an utterer of maxims and quotable 'bits'.
Obviously he was more than that. There is no need to under-rate him
now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets
into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his
poems ('Into my heart an air that kills', for instance, and 'Is my
team ploughing?') that are not likely to remain long out of favour.
But at bottom it is always a writer's tendency, his 'purpose', his
'message', that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is
the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that
seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is ever truly
neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as
much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the form
and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity,
Uke Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.

After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears
a group of writers of completely different tendency–Joyce,
Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton
Strachey. So far as the middle and late twenties go, these are 'the
movement', as surely as the Auden-Spender group have been 'the
movement' during the past few years. It is true that not all of the
gifted writers of the period can be fitted into the pattern. E. M.
Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best book in 1923 or
thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not seem in
either of his phases to belong to the twenties. Others who were
still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas, had
shot their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a
writer who should be added to the group, though in the narrowly
literary sense he hardly 'belongs', is Somerset Maugham. Of course
the dates do not fit exactly; most of these writers had already
published books before the war, but they can be classified as
post-war in the same sense that the younger men now writing are
post-slump. Equally, of course, you could read through most of the
literary papers of the time without grasping that these people are
'the movement'. Even more then than at most times the big shots of
literary journalism were busy pretending that the age-before-last
had not come to an end. Squire ruled the LONDON MERCURY Gibbs and
Walpole were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a cult of
cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and
monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by
writing an article denouncing 'high-brows'. But all the same it was
the despised highbrows who had captured the young. The wind was
blowing from Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the
beer-and-cricket school naked, except for their knighthoods.

But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers
I have named above is that they do not look like a group. Moreover
several of them would strongly object to being coupled with several
of the others. Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic,
Huxley worshipped Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the
others would have looked down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and
Lewis attacked everyone in turn; indeed, his reputation as a writer
rests largely on these attacks. And yet there is a certain
temperamental similarity, evident enough now, though it would not
have been so a dozen years ago. What it amounts to is PESSIMISM OF
OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to make clear what is meant by
pessimism.

If the keynote of the Georgian poets was 'beauty of Nature', the
keynote of the post-war writers would be 'tragic sense of life'.
The spirit behind Housman's poems for instance, is not tragic,
merely querulous; it is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of
Hardy, though one ought to make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But
the Joyce-Eliot group come later in time, puritanism is not their
main adversary, they are able from the start to 'see through' most
of the things that their predecessors had fought for. All of them
are temperamentally hostile to the notion of 'progress'; it is felt
that progress not only doesn't happen, but OUGHT not to happen.
Given this general similarity, there are, of course, differences of
approach between the writers I have named as well as different
degrees of talent. Eliot's pessimism is partly the Christian
pessimism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery,
partly a lament over the decadence of Western civilization ('We are
the hollow men, we are the stuffed men', etc., etc.), a sort of
twilight-of-the-gods feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney
Agonistes for instance, to achieve the difficult feat of making
modern life out to be worse than it is. With Strachey it is merely
a polite eighteenth-century scepticism mixed up with a taste for
debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical resignation, the
stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of Suez, carrying
on with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine Emperor.
Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic writer,
because, like Dickens, he is a 'change-of-heart' man and constantly
insisting that life here and now would be all right if only you
looked at it a little differently. But what he is demanding is a
movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going
to happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once
more into idealization of the past, this time a safely mythical
past, the Bronze Age. When Lawrence prefers the Etruscans (his
Etruscans) to ourselves it is difficult not to agree with him, and
yet, after all, it is a species of defeatism, because that is not
the direction in which the world is moving. The kind of life that
he is always pointing to, a life centring round the simple
mysteries–sex, earth, fire, water, blood–is merely a
lost cause. All he has been able to produce, therefore, is a wish
that things would happen in a way in which they are manifestly not
going to happen. 'A wave of generosity or a wave of death', he
says, but it is obvious that there are no waves of generosity this
side of the horizon. So he flees to Mexico, and then dies at
forty-five, a few years before the wave of death gets going. It
will be seen that once again I am speaking of these people as
though they were not artists, as though they were merely
propagandists putting a 'message' across. And once again it is
obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd,
for instance, to look on ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror
of modern life, the 'dirty DAILY MAIL era', as Pound put it. Joyce
actually is more of a 'pure artist' than most writers. But ULYSSES
could not have been written by someone who was merely dabbling with
word-patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the
vision of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying
is 'Here is life without God. Just look at it!' and his technical
innovations, important though they are, are primarily to serve this
purpose.

But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what
'purpose' they have is very much up in the air. There is no
attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all no
politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to Rome, to
Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the
Subconscious, to the solar plexus–to everywhere except the
places where things are actually happening. When one looks back at
the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every
important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English
intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but
vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin
and the Ukraine famine–about ten years. Throughout those
years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and exiled counts driving
taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and
museums–but not Black-shirts. Germany means films, nudism,
and psychoanalysis–but not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had
heard till 1931. In 'cultured' circles art-for-art's-saking
extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature
was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words. To
judge a book by its subject matter was the unforgivable sin, and
even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of
a taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny jokes that
PUNCH has produced since the Great War, an intolerable youth is
pictured informing his aunt that he intends to 'write'. 'And what
are you going to write about, dear?' asks the aunt. 'My dear aunt,'
says the youth crushingly, 'one doesn't write ABOUT anything, one
just WRITES.' The best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to
this doctrine, their 'purpose' is in most cases fairly overt, but
it is usually 'purpose' along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also,
when translatable into political terms, it is in no case 'left'. In
one way or another the tendency of all the writers in this group is
conservative. Lewis, for instance, spent years in frenzied
witch-smellings after 'Bolshevism', which he was able to detect in
very unlikely places. Recently he has changed some of his views,
perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of artists, but it is safe
to bet that he will not go very far leftward. Pound seems to have
plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the Italian variety.
Eliot has remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's point to
choose between Fascism and some more democratic form of socialism,
would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the usual
despair-of-life, then, under the influence of Lawrence's 'dark
abdomen', tries something called Life-Worship, and finally arrives
at pacifism–a tenable position, and at this moment an
honourable one, but probably in the long run involving rejection of
socialism. It is also noticeable that most of the writers in this
group have a certain tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not
usually of a kind that an orthodox Catholic would accept.

The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook
is no doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just
WHY the leading writers of the twenties were predominantly
pessimistic. Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and
cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and impossible
civilizations? Was it not, after all, BECAUSE these people were
writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch? It is just in such
times that 'cosmic despair' can flourish. People with empty bellies
never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe,
for that matter. The whole period 1910-30 was a prosperous one, and
even the war years were physically tolerable if one happened to be
a non-combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the
twenties, they were the golden age of the RENTIER-intellectual, a
period of irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen.
The war was over, the new totalitarian states had not arisen, moral
and religious tabus of all descriptions had vanished, and the cash
was rolling in. 'Disillusionment' was all the fashion. Everyone
with a safe £500 a year turned highbrow and began training
himself in TAEDIUM VITAE. It was an age of eagles and of crumpets,
facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap return tickets to the end
of the night. In some of the minor characteristic novels of the
period, books like TOLD BY AN IDIOT, the despair-of-life reaches a
Turkish-bath atmosphere of self-pity. And even the best writers of
the time can be convicted of a too Olympian attitude, a too great
readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical problem.
They see life very comprehensively, much more so than those who
come immediately before or after them, but they see it through the
wrong end of the telescope. Not that that invalidates their books,
as books. The first test of any work of art is survival, and it is
a fact that a great deal that was written in the period 1910-30 has
survived and looks like continuing to survive. One has only to
think of ULYSSES, OF HUMAN BONDAGE, most of Lawrence's early work,
especially his short stories, and virtually the whole of Eliot's
poems up to about 1930, to wonder what is now being written that
will wear so well.

But quite Suddenly, in the years 1930-5, something happens. The
literary climate changes. A new group of writers, Auden and Spender
and the rest of them, has made its appearance, and although
technically these writers owe something to their predecessors,
their 'tendency' is entirely different. Suddenly we have got out of
the twilight of the gods into a sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of
bare knees and community singing. The typical literary man ceases
to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning towards the Church, and
becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning towards Communism.
If the keynote of the writers of the twenties is 'tragic sense of
life', the keynote of the new writers is 'serious purpose'.

The differences between the two schools are discussed at some
length in Mr Louis MacNeice's book MODERN POETRY. This book is, of
course, written entirely from the angle of the younger group and
takes the superiority of their standards for granted. According to
Mr MacNeice:

The poets of NEW SIGNATURES, [Note: Published in 1932.(Author's
footnote)] unlike Yeats and Eliot, are emotionally partisan. Yeats
proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and
watched other people's emotions with ennui and an ironical
self-pity...The whole poetry, on the other hand, of Auden, Spender,
and Day Lewis implies that they have desires and hatreds of their
own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired
and others hated.

And again:

The poets of NEW SIGNATURES have swung back...to the Greek
preference for information or statement. Then first requirement is
to have something to say, and after that you must say it as well as
you can.

In other words, 'purpose' has come back, the younger writers
have 'gone into politics'. As I have pointed out already, Eliot
& Co. are not really so non-partisan as Mr MacNeice seems to
suggest. Still, it is broadly true that in the twenties the
literary emphasis was more on technique and less on subject matter
than it is now.

The leading figures in this group are Auden, Spender, Day Lewis,
MacNeice, and there is a long string of writers of more or less the
same tendency, Isherwood, John Lehmann, Arthur Calder-Marshall,
Edward Upward, Alee Brown, Philip Henderson, and many others. As
before, I am lumping them together simply according to tendency.
Obviously there are very great variations in talent. But when one
compares these writers with the Joyce-Eliot generation, the
immediately striking thing is how much easier it is to form them
into a group. Technically they are closer together, politically
they are almost indistinguishable, and their criticisms of one
another's work have always been (to put it mildly) good-natured.
The outstanding writers of the twenties were of very varied
origins, few of them had passed through the ordinary English
educational mill (incidentally, the best of them, barring Lawrence,
were not Englishmen), and most of them had had at some time to
struggle against poverty, neglect, and even downright persecution.
On the other hand, nearly all the younger writers fit easily into
the public-school-university-Bloomsbury pattern. The few who are of
proletarian origin are of the kind that is declassed early in life,
first by means of scholarships and then by the bleaching-tub of
London 'culture'. It is significant that several of the writers in
this group have been not only boys but, subsequently, masters at
public schools. Some years ago I described Auden as 'a sort of
gutless Kipling'. As criticism this was quite unworthy, indeed it
was merely a spiteful remark, but it is a fact that in Auden's
work, especially his earlier work, an atmosphere of
uplift–something rather like Kipling's If or Newbolt's Play
up, Play up, and Play the Game!–never seems to be very far
away. Take, for instance, a poem like 'You're leaving now, and it's
up to you boys'. It is pure scoutmaster, the exact note of the
ten-minutes' straight talk on the dangers of self-abuse. No doubt
there is an element of parody that he intends, but there is also a
deeper resemblance that he does not intend. And of course the
rather priggish note that is common to most of these writers is a
symptom, of release. By throwing 'pure art' overboard they have
freed themselves from the fear of being laughed at and vastly
enlarged their scope. The prophetic side of Marxism, for example,
is new material for poetry and has great possibilities.

We are nothing
We have fallen
Into the dark and shall be destroyed.
Think though, that in this darkness
We hold the secret hub of an idea
Whose living sunlit wheel revolves in future years outside.
(Spender, TRIAL OF A JUDGE)

But at the same time, by being Marxized literature has moved no
nearer to the masses. Even allowing for the time-lag, Auden and
Spender are somewhat farther from being popular writers than Joyce
and Eliot, let alone Lawrence. As before, there are many
contemporary writers who are outside the current, but there is not
much doubt about what is the current. For the middle and late
thirties, Auden Spender & Co. ARE 'the movement', just as
Joyce, Eliot & Co. were for the twenties. And the movement is
in the direction of some rather ill-defined thing called Communism.
As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary
circles not to be more or less 'left', and in another year or two
there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of
opinions absolutely DE RIGUEUR on certain subjects, The idea had
begun to gain ground (VIDE Edward Upward and others) that a writer
must either be actively 'left' or write badly. Between 1935 and
1939 the Communist Party had an almost irresistible fascination for
any writer under forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so
had 'joined' as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman
Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that So-and-so had 'been
received'. For about three years, in fact, the central stream of
English literature was more or less directly under Communist
control. How was it possible for such a thing to happen? And at the
same time, what is meant by 'Communism'? It is better to answer the
second question first.

The Communist movement in Western Europe began, as a movement
for the violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a
few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy. This was
probably inevitable when this revolutionary ferment that followed
the Great War had died down. So far as I know, the only
comprehensive history of this subject in English is Franz
Borkenau's book, THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL. What Borkenau's facts
even more than his deductions make clear is that Communism could
never have developed along its present lines if any revolutionary
feeling had existed in the industrialized countries. In England,
for instance, it is obvious that no such feeling has existed for
years past. The pathetic membership figures of all extremist
parties show this clearly. It is, only natural, therefore, that the
English Communist movement should be controlled by people who are
mentally subservient to Russia and have no real aim except to
manipulate British foreign policy in the Russian interest. Of
course such an aim cannot be openly admitted, and it is this fact
that gives the Communist Party its very peculiar character. The
more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent
posing as an international socialist. It is a pose that is easily
kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in moments of
crisis, because of the fact that the U.S.S.R. is no more scrupulous
in its foreign policy than the rest of the Great Powers. Alliances,
changes of front etc., which only make sense as part of the game of
power politics have to be explained and justified in terms of
international socialism. Every time Stalin swaps partners,
'Marxism' has to be hammered into a new shape. This entails sudden
and violent changes of 'line', purges, denunciations, systematic
destruction of party literature, etc., etc. Every Communist is in
fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental
convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday
may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on. This has
happened at least three times during the past ten years. It follows
that in any Western country a Communist Party is always unstable
and usually very small. Its long-term membership really consists of
an inner ring of intellectuals who have identified with the Russian
bureaucracy, and a slightly larger body of working-class people who
feel a loyalty towards Soviet Russia without necessarily
understanding its policies. Otherwise there is only a shifting
membership, one lot coming and another going with each change of
'line'.

In 1930 the English Communist Party was a tiny, barely legal
organization whose main activity was libelling the Labour Party.
But by 1935 the face of Europe had changed, and left-wing politics
changed with it. Hitler had risen to power and begun to rearm, the
Russian five-year plans had succeeded, Russia had reappeared as a
great military power. As Hitler's three targets of attack were, to
all appearances, Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R., the three
countries were forced into a sort of uneasy RAPPROCHEMENT. This
meant that the English or French Communist was obliged to become a
good patriot and imperialist–that is, to defend the very
things he had been attacking for the past fifteen years. The
Comintern slogans suddenly faded from red to pink. 'World
revolution' and 'Social-Fascism' gave way to 'Defence of democracy'
and 'Stop Hitler'. The years 1935-9 were the period of anti-Fascism
and the Popular Front, the heyday of the Left Book Club, when red
Duchesses and 'broadminded' deans toured the battlefields of the
Spanish war and Winston Churchill was the blue-eyed boy of the
DAILY WORKER. Since then, of course, there has been yet another
change of 'line'. But what is important for my purpose is that it
was during the 'anti-Fascist' phase that the younger English
writers gravitated towards Communism.

The Fascism-democracy dogfight was no doubt an attraction in
itself, but in any case their conversion was due at about that
date. It was obvious that LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism was finished and
that there had got to be some kind of reconstruction; in the world
of 1935 it was hardly possible to remain politically indifferent.
But why did these young men turn towards anything so alien as
Russian Communism? Why should WRITERS be attracted by a form of
socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation
really lies in something that had already made itself felt before
the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most
people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The
trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except
perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that
a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western
civilization had reached its Climax and 'disillusionment' was
immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go
through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a
clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And
how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be
taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the
sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour,
discipline–anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole
lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve,
after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and
religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for
SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. There had been a sort of false dawn a few
years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including
several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and
others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that
these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not,
for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants
sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide
organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power
and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the
only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has
embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical
equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther
than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties
flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply
something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy,
a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and–at any rate since
1935 or thereabouts–a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and
superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come
rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion,
empire, military glory–all in one word, Russia. Father, king,
leader, hero, saviour–all in one word, Stalin.
God–Stalin. The devil–Hitler. Heaven–Moscow.
Hell–Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the
'Communism' of the English intellectual is something explicable
enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the
cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years,
and that is the softness and security of life in England itself.
With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas
corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no
experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that
sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic
régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the
thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and
were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To
people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary
executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote
to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism BECAUSE they
have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for
instance, at this extract from Mr Auden's poem 'Spain'
(incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have
been written about the Spanish war):

To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of
a day in the life of a 'good party man'. In the-morning a couple of
political murders, a ten-minutes' interlude to stifle 'bourgeois'
remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and
evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very
edifying. But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only
be written by a person to whom murder is at most a WORD. Personally
I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have
seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men–I don't mean
killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception
of what murder means–the terror, the hatred, the howling
relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder
is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The
Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don't advertise
their callousness, and they don't speak of it as murder; it is
'liquidation', 'elimination', or some other soothing phrase. Mr
Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of
person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people
who don't even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the
English intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was
largely based on a sense of personal immunity. The attitude was
very different in France, where the military service is hard to
dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.

Towards the end of Mr Cyril Connolly's recent book, ENEMIES OF
PROMISE, there occurs an interesting and revealing passage. The
first part of the book, is, more or less, an evaluation of
present-day literature. Mr Connolly belongs exactly to the
generation of the writers of 'the movement', and with not many
reservations their values are his values. It is interesting to
notice that among prose-writers her admires chiefly those
specialising in violence–the would-be tough American school,
Hemingway, etc. The latter part of the book, however, is
autobiographical and consists of an account, fascinatingly
accurate, of life at a preparatory school and Eton in the years
1910-20. Mr Connolly ends by remarking:

Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it
might be called THE THEORY OF PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE. It is the
theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public
schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest
their development.

When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural
impulse is to look for the misprint. Presumably there is a 'not'
left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He means it! And
what is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted
fashion. 'Cultured' middle-class life has reached a depth of
softness at which a public-school education–five years in a
lukewarm bath of snobbery–can actually be looked back upon as
an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted
during the thirties, what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly
records in ENEMIES OF PROMISE? It is the same pattern all the time;
public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger,
hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual
labour–hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known
as 'the right left people' found it so easy to condone the
purge-and-trap side of the Russian régime and the horrors of
the first Five-Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of
understanding what it all meant.

By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war.
Left-wing thought had narrowed down to 'anti-Fascism', i.e. to a
negative, and a torrent of hate-literature directed against Germany
and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from
the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the
war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the
party feuds behind the lines, but the immediate reappearance in
left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The
very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own
superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back
into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies,
spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good
anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into
vogue as though the intervening years had never happened. Before
the end of the Spanish war, and even before Munich, some of the
better of the left-wing writers were beginning to squirm. Neither
Auden nor, on the whole, Spender wrote about the Spanish war in
quite the vein that was expected of them. Since then there has been
a change of feeling and much dismay and confusion, because the
actual course of events has made nonsense of the left-wing
orthodoxy of the last few years. But then it did not need very
great acuteness to see that much of it was nonsense from the start.
There is no certainty, therefore, that the next orthodoxy to emerge
will be any better than the last.

On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to
justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of
politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the
discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the
alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible
to toe the line and go on writing–after a fashion. Any
Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that 'bourgeois'
liberty of thought is an illusion. But when he has finished his
demonstration there remains the psychological FACT that without
this 'bourgeois' liberty the creative powers wither away. In the
future a totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite
different from anything we can now imagine. Literature as we know
it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum
of censorship. And this is even truer of prose than of verse. It is
probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the thirties
have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to
prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the
most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman
Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name
have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a
Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the
autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty
years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the
nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological
works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value
at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly
against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the ZEITGEIST
was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course, was
definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on
its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and
squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a
disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was
a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you
were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of
lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say
this? Is it pro-Fascist?') was at work in nearly everyone's mind.
It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in
such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not written by by
orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about
their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are
NOT FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.

III

If this were a likely, moment for the launching of 'schools'
literature, Henry Miller might be the starting-point of a new
'school'. He does at any rate mark an unexpected swing of the
pendulum. In his books one gets right away from the 'political
animal' and back to a viewpoint not only individualistic but
completely passive–the view-point of a man who believes the
world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly
wishes to control it.

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing
through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him
was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever.
He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that
moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going
there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance,
but to mix oneself up in such things FROM A SENSE OBLIGATION was
sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism,
defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization
was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so
different that we should scarcely regard it as human–a
prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is
implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the
approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief
that it doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so
far as I know, he has ever made in print is a purely negative one.
A year or so ago an American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent
out a questionnaire to various American writers asking them to
define their attitude on the subject of war. Miller replied in
terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no
apparent wish to convert others to the same
opinion–practically, in fact, a declaration of
irresponsibility.

However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a
rule, writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the
historical process at the moment either ignore it or fight against
if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can
understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they
probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win. Look,
for instance, at a poem like 'The Scholar Gipsy', with its railing
against the 'strange disease of modern life' and its magnificent
defeatist simile is the final stanza. It expresses one of the
normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing attitude
during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the
'progressives', the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping
forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the
future. On the whole the writers of the twenties took the first
line and the writers of the thirties the second. And at any given
moment, of course, there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings
and Dells who simply don't notice what is happening. Where Miller's
work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance of any of
these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward
nor trying to drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means
ignoring it. I should say that he believes in the impending ruin of
Western Civilization much more firmly than the majority of
'revolutionary' writers; only he does not feel called upon to do
anything about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and,
unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with
his face towards the flames.

In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing
passages in which a writer tells you a great deal about himself
while talking about somebody else. The book includes a long essay
on the diaries of Anais Nin, which I have never read, except for a
few fragments, and which I believe have not been published. Miller
claims that they are the only true feminine writing that has ever
appeared, whatever that may mean. But the interesting passage is
one in which he compares Anais Nin–evidently a completely
subjective, introverted writer–to Jonah in the whale's belly.
In passing he refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some
years ago about El Greco's picture, The Dream of Philip the Second.
Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look
as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find
something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a 'visceral
prison'. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse
things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it
dear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is
touching upon what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is
perhaps worth noticing that everyone, at least every
English-speaking person, invariably speaks of Jonah and the WHALE.
Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a fish, and was so
described in the Bible (Jonah i. 17), but children naturally
confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-talk is
habitually carried into later life–a sign, perhaps, of the
hold that the Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is
that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike
thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad
enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless
people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The
whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you
are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards
of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an
attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what HAPPENS. A
storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly
reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would probably
be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface
waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a
mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never
notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final,
unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with
Anais Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the
whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written
from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially
introverted–quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens
to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the
process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah
act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive,
ACCEPTING.

It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of
quietism, implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of
belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is 'JE M'EN FOUS' or
'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him', whichever way you
like to look at it; for practical purposes both are identical, the
moral in either case being 'Sit on your bum'. But in a time like
ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that it is almost
impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the moment of
writing, we are still in a period in which it is taken for granted
that books ought always to be positive, serious, and
'constructive'. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted
with titters. ('My dear aunt, one doesn't write about anything, one
just WRITES.') Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous
notion that art is merely technique, but it swung a very long
distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only be 'good'
if it is founded on a 'true' vision of life. Naturally the people
who believe this also believe that they are in possession of the
truth themselves. Catholic critics, for instance, tend to claim
that books arc only 'good' when they are of Catholic tendency.
Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for Marxist books.
For instance, Mr Edward Upward ('A Marxist Interpretation of
Literature,' in the MIND IN CHAINS):

Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must...proclaim
that no book written at the present time can be 'good' unless it is
written from a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.

Various other writers have made similar or comparable
statements. Mr Upward italicizes 'at the present time' because, he
realizes that you cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET on the
ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his
interesting essay only glances very shortly at this difficulty.
Much of the literature that comes to us out of the past is
permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the
immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false
and in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet if is 'good' literature,
if survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a
belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be
inappropriate and therefore stultifying now. But this does not get
one much farther, because it assumes that in any age there will be
ONE body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and
that the best literature of the time will be more or less in
harmony with it. Actually no such uniformity has ever existed. In
seventeenth-century England, for instance, there was a religious
and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left-right
antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern people would feel
that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better approximation to
truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly not the
case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time
were puritans. And more than this, there exist 'good' writers whose
world-view would in any age be recognized false and silly. Edgar
Allan Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild
romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the
literal clinical sense. Why is it, then that stories like The Black
Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher and so
forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do
not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a
certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world,
like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully
about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees the
difference immediately if one compares Poe's TALES with what is, in
my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere,
Julian Green's MINUIT. The thing that immediately strikes one about
MINUIT is that there is no reason why any of the events in it
should happen. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no
emotional sequence. But this is exactly what one does NOT feel with
Poe's stories. Their maniacal logic, in its own setting, is quite
convincing. When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat
and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows exactly WHY he
did it, even to the point of feeling that one would have done the
same oneself. It seems therefore that for a creative writer
possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional
sincerity. Even Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs
nothing beyond a Marxist training. He also needs a talent. But
talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really
BELIEVING in your beliefs, whether they are true or false. The
difference between, for instance, Céline and Evelyn Waugh is
a difference of emotional intensity. It is the difference between
genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly a pretence.
And with this there goes another consideration which is perhaps
less obvious: that there are occasions when an 'untrue' belief is
more likely to be sincerely held than a 'true' one.

If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about
the war of 1914-18, one notices that nearly all that have remained
readable after a lapse of time are written from a passive, negative
angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a
nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth
about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction.
The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing
waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling
experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to
make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out
of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective. As for
the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them
were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs
and tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr E. M.
Forster has described how in 1917 he read Prufrock and other of
Eliot's early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get
hold of poems that were 'innocent of public-spiritedness':

They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who
seemed genuine because they were unattractive or weak...Here was a
protest, and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being o
feeble...He who could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing
rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the
human heritage.

That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred
to already, quotes this passage and somewhat smugly adds:

Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets
and the human heritage carried on rather differently...The
contemplation of a world of fragments becomes boring and Eliot's
successors are more interested in tidying it up.

Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice's book.
What he wishes us to believe is that Eliot's 'successors' (meaning
Mr MacNeice and his friends) have in some way 'protested' more
effectively than Eliot did by publishing Prufrock at the moment
when the Allied armies were assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just
where these 'protests' are to be found I do not know. But in the
contrast between Mr Forster's comment and Mr MacNeice's lies all
the difference between a man who knows what the 1914-18 war was
like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that in 1917
there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could do,
except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness,
even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had
been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got
hold of Prufrock than THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio
Bottomley's LETTERS TO THE BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have
felt, like Mr Forster, that by simply standing aloof and keeping
touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human
heritage. What a relief it would have been at such a time, to read
about the hesitations of a middle-aged highbrow with a bald spot!
So different from bayonet-drill! After the bombs and the
food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a
relief!

But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment
in an almost continuous crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a
war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the
increasing helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this
reason that I think that the passive, non-co-operative attitude
implied in Henry Miller's work is justified. Whether or not it is
an expression of what people OUGHT to feel, it probably comes
somewhere near to expressing what they DO feel. Once again it is
the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American
voice, 'innocent of public-spiritedness'. No sermons, merely the
subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still
possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an
edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be
remembered after it is read.

While I have been writing this essay another European war has
broken out. It will either last several years and tear Western
civilization to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare
the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all.
But war is only 'peace intensified'. What is quite obviously
happening, war or no war, is the break-up of LAISSEZ-FAIRE
capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the
full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was
generally imagined that socialism could preserve and even enlarge
the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized
how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age
of totalitarian dictatorships–an age in which freedom of
thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless
abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out
of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which
we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature
of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of
totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As
for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an
anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as
the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a man out of the common
because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before most of
his contemporaries–at a time, indeed, when many of them were
actually burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis
had said years earlier that the major history of the English
language was finished, but he was basing this on different and
rather trivial reasons. But from now onwards the all-important fact
for the creative writers going to be that this is not a writer's
world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new
society into being, but he can take no part in the process AS A
WRITER. For AS A WRITER he is a liberal, and what is happening is
the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in
the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will
follow more or less along the lines that Miller has
followed–I do not mean in technique or subject matter, but in
implied outlook. The passive attitude will come back, and it will
be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have
both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but
quietism–robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting
to it. Get inside the whale–or rather, admit you are inside
the whale (for you ARE, of course). Give yourself over to the
world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you
control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to
be the formula, that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt.
A novel on more positive, 'constructive' lines, and not emotionally
spurious, is at present very difficult to imagine.

But do I mean by this that Miller is a 'great author', a new
hope for English prose? Nothing of the kind. Miller himself would
be the last to claim or want any such thing. No doubt he will go on
writing–anybody who has ones started always goes on
writing–and associated with him there are a number of writers
of approximately the same tendency, Lawrence Durrell, Michael
Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a 'school'. But he himself
seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should
expect him to descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism:
there are signs of both in his later work. His last book, TROPIC OF
CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not because I did not
want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities
have so far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it
would surprise me if it came anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the
opening chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like certain other
autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing
perfectly, and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the
nineteen-thirties has been like, that is something.

Miller's books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What
will happen to the Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and
Jack Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do not know, but at any
rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who
has not done so to read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little
ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can
get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick
in your memory. It is also an 'important' book, in a sense
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a
rule novels are spoken of as 'important' when they are either a
'terrible indictment' of something or other or when they introduce
some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to TROPIC OF
CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is
the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has
appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even
if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be
admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more
than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative,
unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of
evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically, that is
more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are
published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of
them are tripe. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of any
major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new
shape.

THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)

Who does not know the 'comics' of the cheap stationers' windows,
the penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their endless
succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude
drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's-egg tint
and Post Office red?

This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact
that many people seem to be unaware of the existence of these
things, or else to have a vague notion that they are something to
be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint
rock. Actually they are on sale everywhere–they can be bought
at nearly any Woolworth's, for example–and they are evidently
produced in enormous numbers, new series constantly appearing. They
are not to be confused with the various other types of comic
illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with
puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, sub-pornographic ones which
exploit the love affairs of children. They are a genre of their
own, specializing in very 'low' humour, the mother-in-law,
baby's-nappy, policemen's-boot type of joke, and distinguishable
from all the other kinds by having no artistic pretensions. Some
half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people who draw
them seem not to be numerous at any one time.

I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill
because he is not only the most prolific and by far the best of
contemporary post card artists, but also the most representative,
the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not
know. He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of
post cards is issued simply as 'The Donald McGill Comics', but he
is also unquestionable a real person with a style of drawing which
is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his post cards in
bulk will notice that many of them are not despicable even as
drawings, but it would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they
have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is simply an
illustration to a joke, invariably a 'low' joke, and it stands or
falls by its ability to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only
'ideological' interest. McGill is a clever draughtsman with a real
caricaturist's touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value
of his post cards is that they are so completely typical. They
represent, as it were, the norm of the comic post card. Without
being in the least imitative, they are exactly what comic post
cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the
meaning and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.

Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably
McGill's–if you pick out from a pile the ones that seem to
you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are
McGill's–and spread them out on a table. What do you see?

Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is
quite apart from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also from
the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter low-ness of
mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the
jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of
the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy
lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture
and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and
vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like
Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable
familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so
like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely
different post cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood.
But more than this, what you are really looking at is something as
traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked
bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western
European consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are
necessarily stale. Not being debarred from smuttiness, comic post
cards repeat themselves less often than the joke columns in
reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the KIND of
joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty,
in a Max Millerish style. Examples:

'I like seeing experienced girls home.'

'But I'm not experienced!'

'You're not home yet!'

'I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you
get yours?'

'I left off struggling.'

JUDGE: 'You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep
with this woman?'

Co-respondent: 'Not a wink, my lord!'

In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it
must be said for McGill's post cards, in particular, that the
drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke beneath it.
Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their
obscenity, and I must discuss that more fully later. But I give
here a rough analysis of their habitual subject-matter, with such
explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:

SEX.–More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes
are sex jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but
unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby.
Typical captions: 'Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's
feeding-bottle?' 'She didn't ask me to the christening, so I'm not
going to the wedding.' Also newlyweds, old maids, nude statues and
women in bathing-dresses. All of these are IPSO FACTO funny, mere
mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke
is seldom exploited, and there are no references to
homosexuality.

Conventions of the sex joke:

(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting
seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever
remained unmarried voluntarily.

(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five.
Well-preserved and good-looking people beyond their first youth are
never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the
grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband,
no intermediate stage being allowed for.

HOME LIFE–Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the
favourite joke. Typical caption: 'Did they get an X-ray of your
wife's jaw at the hospital?'–'No, they got a moving picture
instead.'

Conventions:

(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.

(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument.
Drunkenness–Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto
funny.

Conventions:

(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.

(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men.
Drunken youths or women are never represented.

W.C. JOKES–There is not a large number of these. Chamber
pots are ipso facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical
post card captioned 'A Friend in Need', shows a man's hat blown off
his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies' lavatory.

INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY–Much in these post cards
suggests that they are aimed at the better-off working class and
poorer middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms,
illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum dwellers.
Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type
exchanging 'unladylike' abuse. Typical repartee: 'I wish you were a
statue and I was a pigeon!' A certain number produced since the war
treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual
jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic
maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy,
bargee, etc.; but there are no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly
speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is
regarded as laughable. The 'swell' is almost as automatically a
figure of fun as the slum-dweller.

STOCK FIGURES–Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief
locality joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The
lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot
who says the wrong thing. The 'knut' or 'masher' still appears,
almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes
and an opera hat, or even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival
is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of the pre-1914 period and
too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged in
physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance
fanatic. A feature of the last few years is the complete absence of
anti-Jew post cards. The 'Jew joke', always somewhat more
ill-natured than the 'Scotch joke', disappeared abruptly soon after
the rise of Hitler.

POLITICS–Any contemporary event, cult or activity which
has comic possibilities (for example, 'free love', feminism,
A.R.P., nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards,
but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The
implied political outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the
year 1900. At normal times they are not only not patriotic, but go
in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about 'God save the
King', the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to
reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and first did so
through the comic aspects of A.R.P. Even at this date few post
cards mention the war except in A.R.P. jokes (fat woman stuck in
the mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while
young woman undresses at window she has forgotten to black out,
etc., etc.) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments of a not very
vindictive kind. One, not McGill's, shows Hitler with the usual
hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption;
'What would you do, chums?' This is about as high a flight of
patriotism as any post card is likely to attain. Unlike the
twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any
great monopoly company, and evidently they are not regarded as
having any importance in forming public opinion. There is no sign
in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the
ruling class.

Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of
comic post cards–their obscenity. It is by this that everyone
remembers them, and it is also central to their purpose, though not
in a way that is immediately obvious.

A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the
woman with the stuck-out behind. In perhaps half of them, or more
than half, even when the point of the joke has nothing to do with
sex, the same female figure appears, a plump 'voluptuous' figure
with the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with
breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasized according to which way
it is turned. There can be no doubt that these pictures lift the
lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country
whose women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness.
But at the same time the McGill post card–and this applies to
all other post cards in this genre–is not intended as
pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The
Hottentot figures of the women are caricatures of the Englishman's
secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one examines McGill's post
cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only has a
meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in
papers like ESQUIRE, for instance, or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the
imaginary background of the jokes is always promiscuity, the utter
breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card
is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate
babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which would
seem funny in a really dissolute or even 'sophisticated' society.
The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the
enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still
considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In
one, for example, a young bridegroom is shown getting out of bed
the morning after his wedding night. 'The first morning in our own
little home, darling!' he is saying; 'I'll go and get the milk and
paper and bring you up a cup of tea.' Inset is a picture of the
front doorstep; on it are four newspapers and four bottles of milk.
This is obscene, if you like, but it is not immoral. Its
implication–and this is just the implication the ESQUIRE or
the NEW YORKER would avoid at all costs–is that marriage is
something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event in
the average human being's life.

So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous
mothers-in-law. They do at least imply a stable society in which
marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for granted. And
bound up with this is something I noted earlier, the fact there are
no pictures, or hardly any, of good-looking people beyond their
first youth. There is the 'spooning' couple and the middle-aged,
cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between. The liaison, the
illicit but more or less decorous love-affair which used to be the
stock joke of French comic papers, is not a post card subject. And
this reflects, on a comic level, the working-class outlook which
takes it as a matter of course that youth and
adventure–almost, indeed, individual life–end with
marriage. One of the few authentic class-differences, as opposed to
class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working
classes age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided
that they survive their childhood, nor do they lose their physical
activity earlier, but they do lose very early their youthful
appearance. This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most
easily verified by watching one of the higher age groups
registering for military service; the middle–and upper-class
members look, on average, ten years younger than the others. It is
usual to attribute this to the harder lives that the working
classes have to live, but it is doubtful whether any such
difference now exists as would account for it. More probably the
truth is that the working classes reach middle age earlier because
they accept it earlier. For to look young after, say, thirty is
largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalization is less
true of the better-paid workers, especially those who live in
council houses and labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even
of them to point to a difference of outlook. And in this, as usual,
they are more traditional, more in accord with the Christian past
than the well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means
of physical-jerks, cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing. The
impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your
sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself
and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and
has only precariously established itself. It will probably
disappear again when our standard of living drops and our
birth-rate rises. 'Youth's a stuff will not endure' expresses the
normal, traditional attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill
and his colleagues are reflecting, no doubt unconsciously, when
they allow for no transition stage between the honeymoon couple and
those glamourless figures, Mum and Dad.

I have said that at least half of McGill's post cards are sex
jokes, and a proportion, perhaps ten per cent, are far more obscene
than anything else that is now printed in England. Newsagents are
occasionally prosecuted for selling them, and there would be many
more prosecutions if the broadest jokes were not invariably
protected by double meanings. A single example will be enough to
show how this is done. In one post card, captioned 'They didn't
believe her', a young woman is demonstrating, with her hands held
apart, something about two feet long to a couple of open-mouthed
acquaintances. Behind her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a glass
case, and beside that is a photograph of a nearly naked athlete.
Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this
could never be proved. Now, it is doubtful whether there is any
paper in England that would print a joke of this kind, and
certainly there is no paper that does so habitually. There is an
immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated
papers cashing in on women's legs, but there is no popular
literature specializing in the 'vulgar', farcical aspect of sex. On
the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill's are the ordinary small
change of the revue and music-hall stage, and are also to be heard
on the radio, at moments when the censor happens to be nodding. In
England the gap between what can be said and what can be printed is
rather exceptionally wide. Remarks and gestures which hardly anyone
objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if any attempt
were made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller's stage
patter with his weekly column in the SUNDAY DISPATCH) The comic
post cards are the only existing exception to this rule, the only
medium in which really 'low' humour is considered to be printable.
Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out
behind, dog and lamp-post, baby's nappy type of joke be freely
exploited. Remembering that, one sees what function these post
cards, in their humble way, are performing.

What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza
view of life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West once
summed up as 'extracting as much fun as possible from smacking
behinds in basement kitchens'. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza
combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body
and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature
of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere
imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations,
Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus,
Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally
subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two
partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to
something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that
either character is to be found in a 'pure' state in real life, but
in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom,
exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into
your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost
certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be
a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who
sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole
skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting
against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no
work, pots of beer and women with 'voluptuous' figures. He it is
who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after
Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and
so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by
him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he
is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is
not part of you either, though most of what is said and written
consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.

But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of
literature, in real life, especially in the way society is ordered,
his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant
world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least
that he doesn't matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious
systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard
pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round
obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival,
have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A
dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but
it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were
otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round
cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society
cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little
more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to
demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its
subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their
wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the
battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing.
The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on
such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before
battle, the speeches of Führers and prime ministers, the
solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties,
national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons
against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the
background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common
men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the
high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood,
toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than
those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch,
human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing
brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture
chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when
their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man,
the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us,
can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing
occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a
humble one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy
of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they
naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if
they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably
concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the
unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on
the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they
are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their
unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but
lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint
of 'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the
worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is
a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind
and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always
a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make
fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses
and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the
morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them
behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact
that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music
halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against
virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a
tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like
water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too
good, and not quite all the time. For:

there is a just man that perished in his righteousness, and
there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.
Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over wise; why
shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be
thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy time?

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the
central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from
McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in
Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole
category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or
thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards,
leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The
corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest
itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them
vanish.

THE LION AND THE UNICORN: SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH GENIUS
(1941)

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I
against them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes.
Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who
would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the
other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a
well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is
serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from
evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes
the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In
certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of
civilization it does not exist, but as a POSITIVE force there is
nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism
are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini
rose to power in their own countries very largely because they
could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.

Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and
nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it
was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much
alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the
average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to
country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen
in another. Hitler's June purge, for instance, could not have
happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are
very highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed
admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel
for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in
England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have
immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the
first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this
feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is
greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big
towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle
manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of
England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that
the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there
really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million
individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The
clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of
the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour
Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids
hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn
morning–all these are not only fragments, but CHARACTERISTIC
fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of
this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and
you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something
distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a
culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with
solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads,
green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.
Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the
past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living
creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the
England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child
of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece?
Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is YOUR civilization, it is you. However much
you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it
for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes
have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong
to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the
marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is
changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain
directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say
that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are
possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any
rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of
the deepest importance to try and determine what England IS, before
guessing what part England CAN PLAY in the huge events that are
happening.

ii.

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when
pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have
no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals,
Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the
Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don't
matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even
the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about
the realities of English life.

Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be
accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not
gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or
Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England
as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the
English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract
thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic
'world-view'. Nor is this because they are 'practical', as they are
so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their
methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging
to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system
that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is
intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how
little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain
power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed
hypocrisy–their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for
instance–is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme
crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a
species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood
by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler
coined for the Germans, 'a sleep-walking people', would have been
better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be
proud of in being called a sleep-walker.

But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is
extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a
love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices
when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming
from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English
indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people
who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with,
however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part
of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to
hobbies and spare-time occupations, the PRIVATENESS of English
life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of
stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters,
coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the
culture that is most truly native centres round things which even
when they are communal are not official–the pub, the football
match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'. The
liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the
nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic
liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty
to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time,
to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you
from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is
Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely
private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the
English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted,
'co-ordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is in the other
direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on
them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth
Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or 'spontaneous'
demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.

But in all societies the common people must live to some extent
AGAINST the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of
England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially
and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one
notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in
the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are
inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit,
are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language
in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of
astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc.
etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in
practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are
without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries.
The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a
preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only
influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of
Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The
power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has
infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common
people. They have never caught up with power politics. The
'realism' which is preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers
would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the spirit of
England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the
windows of cheap stationers' shops. These things are a sort of
diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded
themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies,
their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness,
their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most
marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on
English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are
good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country
inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the
pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off
by European observers as 'decadence' or hypocrisy, the English
hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it
is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class.
Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within
living memory it was common for 'the redcoats' to be booed at in
the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to
refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when
there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks
of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry
and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm
labourers and slum proletarians. The mass of the people are without
military knowledge or tradition, and their attitude towards war is
invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by
promising them conquests or military 'glory', no Hymn of Hate has
ever made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the
soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but
humorous and mock-defeatist [Note, below]. The only enemy they ever
named was the sergeant-major.

[Note: For example:

'I don't want to join the bloody Army,
I don't want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam,
I'd rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.

But it was not in that spirit that they fought. (Author's
footnote.)]

In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule
Britannia' stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of
the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not
retain among their historical memories the name of a single
military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is
full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that
have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of
disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or
Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's army at Corunna, fighting
a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like
Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most
stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which
charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names
which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are
Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster.
The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies
are simply unknown to the general public.

The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign
observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire.
It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed
a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy.
How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?

It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their
Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not
knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing
armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively
few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home
politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but
there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people
of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the
swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of
boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word 'Prussian'
had much the same significance in England as 'Nazi' has today. So
deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the
officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn
civilian clothes when off duty.

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a
country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really
a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a
certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of
the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a
dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained
in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot
crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for
what it is saying is 'Yes, I am UGLY, and you daren't laugh at me',
like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step
not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army
officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing.
It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond
a certain point, military display is only possible in countries
where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians
adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed
definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do
it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it
survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline
into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill
is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth
century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a
formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the
sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the
scabbard.

And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with
barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as
the muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you
have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge,
some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth
century, handing out savage sentences. In England people are still
hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o' nine tails. Both of
these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never
been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them
(and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They
are part of 'the law', which is assumed to be unalterable.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect
for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as
something above the State and above the individual, something which
is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate INCORRUPTIBLE.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone
knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for
granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a
sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me
in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's
against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The
professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as
anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's
WALLS HAVE MOUTHS or Jim Phelan's JAIL JOURNEY, in the solemn
idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors,
in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing
out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'.
Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be,
and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The
totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only
power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only
accepted it in theory.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the
expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that
democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism
never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to
saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such
concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed
in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.
The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different
because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the
rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in
the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond
a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an
all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in
the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has
occurred in the public mind, it cannot become COMPLETELY corrupt.
You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers
telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is
there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard.
The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair
wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he
is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according
to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is
one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the
strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege,
humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the
nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

iii.

I have spoken all the while of 'the nation', 'England',
'Britain', as though forty-five million souls could somehow be
treated as a unit. But is not England notoriously two nations, the
rich and the poor? Dare one pretend that there is anything in
common between people with £100,000 a year and people with
£1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are likely to
have been offended because I have used the word 'England' oftener
than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London and
the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of
its own.

One gets a better view of this question if one considers the
minor point first. It is quite true that the so-called races of
Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A
Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an
Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the
fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names,
England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United
Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences
between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But
somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons
are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a foreigner,
other than an American, who can distinguish between English and
Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the
Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles
is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the
French', recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization,
which in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the
outsider even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family
resemblance.

And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat
when one regards the nation from the outside. There is no question
about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in
any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest
street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations,
if not three or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the
people FEEL themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of
resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always
stronger than any kind of internationalism. Except for a brief
moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the British
working class have never thought or acted internationally. For two
and a half years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly
strangled, and never aided them by even a single strike [Note,
below]. But when their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield
and Mr Montagu Norman) was in danger, their attitude was very
different. At the moment when it seemed likely that England might
be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio for Local Defence
Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the first
twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One
has only to compare these figures with, for instance, the number of
conscientious objectors to see how vast is the strength of
traditional loyalties compared with new ones.

[Note: It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with
money. Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would
not equal five per cent of the turnover of the football pools
during the same period. (Author's footnote.)]

In England patriotism takes different forms in different
classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of
them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it.
As a positive emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in
the upper class–the cheap public schools, for instance, are
more given to patriotic demonstrations than the expensive
ones–but the number of definitely treacherous rich men, the
Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In the working class
patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The working man's
heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the famous
'insularity' and 'xenophobia' of the English is far stronger in the
working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor
are more national than the rich, but the English working class are
outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they
are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly
every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to
pronounce a foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the
English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent
that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back
a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they
admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a
liking for wine. The insularity of the English, their refusal to
take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very
heavily from time to time. But it plays its part in the English
mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down
have generally done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same
quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps
out the invader.

Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I
pointed out, seemingly at random, at the beginning of the last
chapter. One is the lack of artistic ability. This is perhaps
another way of saying that the English are outside the European
culture. For there is one art in which they have shown plenty of
talent, namely literature. But this is also the only art that
cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry, and lyric
poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no
value outside its own language-group. Except for Shakespeare, the
best English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The
only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the
wrong reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of
English hypocrisy. And linked up with this, though not very
obviously, is the lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in
nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered system of thought
or even for the use of logic.

Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a
'world-view'. Just because patriotism is all but universal and not
even the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the
whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like
a herd of cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment,
unmistakably, at the time of the disaster in France. After eight
months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people
suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away
from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the
awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The Philistines be upon thee,
Samson! And then the swift unanimous action–and, then, alas,
the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that would have
been exactly the moment for a big peace movement to arise. But does
this mean that the instinct of the English will always tell them to
do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will tell them to do
the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for instance, we all
did the wrong thing in perfect unison. We were as single-minded as
the Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can say that we
were shoved down the slope against our will.

It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it
sometimes appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality
of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the governing-class control
over the press, the radio and education, and concludes that
democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this
ignores the considerable agreement that does unfortunately exist
between the leaders and the led. However much one may hate to admit
it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National
Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It
tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes,
but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its
natural leaders were mediocrities.

In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is
fairly certain that the bulk of the English people were behind
Chamberlain's foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the
same struggle was going on in Chamberlain's mind as in the minds of
ordinary people. His opponents professed to see in him a dark and
wily schemer, plotting to sell England to Hitler, but it is far
likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best
according to his very dim lights. It is difficult otherwise to
explain the contradictions of his policy, his failure to grasp any
of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass of the people,
he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of war. And
public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that were
completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he
went to Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with
Russia, when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it,
and when he prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the
results of his policy became apparent did it turn against him;
which is to say that it turned against its own lethargy of the past
seven years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their
mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are
not won without fighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another
leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations can fight
effectively.

Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No,
not even a reader of the DAILY TELEGRAPH could quite swallow
that.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a
land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account
its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to
feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the
only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds
of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camp.
At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets
abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for
surrender are being sold on the streets, almost without
interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of speech
than from a simple perception that these things don't matter. It is
safe to let a paper like PEACE NEWS be sold, because it is certain
that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read
it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any
normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us
into the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard,
let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and
it is difficult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who
denounce the whole of the ruling class as 'pro-Fascist' are grossly
over-simplifying. Even among the inner clique of politicians who
brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful whether there were
any CONSCIOUS traitors. The corruption that happens in England is
seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of
self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand
doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its
most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or
dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers
that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers
exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose
there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed
with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very
few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter
like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in England has never
been OPENLY scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of
disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted
message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than
either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family,
with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting
with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to
and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep
conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is
a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the
power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common
memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A
family with the wrong members in control–that, perhaps, is as
near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

iv.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of
Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost
there. One of the dominant facts in English life during the past
three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the
ruling class.

In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the
speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is
still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has
had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of
English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth
century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost
power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply
intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who
had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of
themselves. The wealthy ship owner or cotton-miller set up for
himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the
right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just
that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly
recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made
men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into
a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one
might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such
way.

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its
daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when
stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of
exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him
with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.
The mishandling of England's domestic problems during the
nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy
between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What
had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made every
British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an
instinct?

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed
class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the
centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing
interest and profits and spending them–on what? It was fair
to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better
than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India
slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners
jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and
unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country
houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover,
the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones
robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by
salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in
England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was
invested they hardly knew where, the 'idle rich', the people whose
photographs you can look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always
supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by
any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful
to society than his fleas are to a dog.

By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By
1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class
obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was
at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For
it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits,
like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust
privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas
bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain
tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying
for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and
greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves true
patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there
was only one escape for them–into stupidity. They could keep
society in its existing shape only by being UNABLE to grasp that
any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they
achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing
to notice the changes that were going on round them.

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the
decay of country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism
which drives the more spirited workers off the land. It explains
the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered
since the eighties of the last century. It explains the military
incompetence which has again and again startled the world. Since
the fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off
with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been
saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher
commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for
modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit
to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung
to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each
war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared
for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the
present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of
men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon
entirely useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that
the navy and, latterly, the air force, have always been more
efficient than the regular army. But the navy is only partially,
and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.

It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the
methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their
own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England
might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or
haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of
comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a
quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be
found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under,
and looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the
British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the
truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been
obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from
the outside.

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they
could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled
against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western
Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the
theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that
the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and
out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained
themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry
generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns–by ignoring it.
After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one
fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism.
Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British
dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of
Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships,
bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed
by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that
Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the
huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics
it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of
the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as
can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if
Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for
England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to
the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of
political ignorance runs right through English official life,
through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges,
magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the 'red' does
not understand the theories the 'red' is preaching; if he did his
own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less
pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military
espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic
doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.

The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking
that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man,
unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either
Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this,
for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed
to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare,
Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler.
But–and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have
spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes
in–they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and
selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class
would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things
had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make
cringing speeches about 'the duty of loyalty to our conquerors' are
hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro
between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that
men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both
worlds.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class
are MORALLY fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready
enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what nots
were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not
happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are
sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand
their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be
expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but
stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing
the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked;
they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are
gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they
are living in.

v.

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected
everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon
two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the
military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the
Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two
seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites–the half-pay
colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur,
the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck–are
mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another;
in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same
families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its
vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the
prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy
and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon
to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had
killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more
governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for
individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon
would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By
1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of
Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and
black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left
forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and
Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were
reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under
mounds of paper and red tape. In the early twenties one could see,
all over the Empire, the older officials, who had known more
spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were
happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to
impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in
imperial administration. And what was true of the official world
was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies
swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay
or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller
and safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained
strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but
the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able
men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of
the whole British morale, that took place during the
nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing
intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the
stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is
not in some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual
was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an
'intellectual' has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the
existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was
constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply
stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an
England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to
be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that
could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl
Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any
important job. The intellectuals could find a function for
themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political
parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be
studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately
striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative,
querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any
constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the
irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never
expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic
is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas
and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals
of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war
against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that
the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil
War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really
important fact about so many of the English
intelligentsia–their severance from the common culture of the
country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are
Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions
from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a
sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only
great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own
nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is
something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it
is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is
unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel
more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King'
than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years
many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to
spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes
violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable
how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English
people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so
that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that
it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the
Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS
CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it
harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to
enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the
military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread
of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English
intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE
creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class
stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in
them to see that devotion to one's country implies 'for better, for
worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it
were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and
intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE
and publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you were an
intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical
courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous
convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his
mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A
modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and
intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that
we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may
make this possible.

vi.

One of the most important developments in England during the
past twenty years has been the upward and downward extension of the
middle class. It has happened on such a scale as to make the old
classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit
bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete.

England is a country in which property and financial power are
concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England OWN
anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house.
The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent
shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing
in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated
that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers,
salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing
fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a
professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc.
etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to
enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed
likely to do.

But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class
ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class
are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years
ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but
partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always
realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a
country can rise without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to
a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However
unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound
to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are
necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example,
light the streets for himself while darkening them for other
people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the
use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free
libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education
in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has
nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the
teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more
widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the
same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same
radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have
been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and
improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the
clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ
far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to
housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization,
but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely
by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its
bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker's
villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the
farm labourer's cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a
council housing estate is likely to be–indeed, visibly
is–more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown
up in a slum.

The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is
enhanced by the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to
demand less muscular effort and therefore to leave people with more
energy when their day's work is done. Many workers in the light
industries are less truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a
grocer. In tastes, habits, manners and outlook the working class
and the middle class are drawing together. The unjust distinctions
remain, but the real differences diminish. The old-style
'proletarian'–collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by
heavy labour–still exists, but he is constantly decreasing in
numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of the
north of England.

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never
existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In
1910 every human being in these islands could be 'placed' in an
instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the
case. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have
developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift
of industry. The place to look for the germs of the future England
is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough,
Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes–everywhere, indeed, on
the outskirts of great towns–the old pattern is gradually
changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of
glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town,
with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its
manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide
gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being
lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council
houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the
swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring
round tinned food, PICTURE POST, the radio and the internal
combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up
with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance
of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most
at home in and most definitely OF the modern world, the technicians
and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their
mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists
and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at
which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the
existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who
wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes
life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities
of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the
rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges
from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that
I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it
Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the
hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the
hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and
the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as
prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national
culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough
will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned
into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be
forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal
stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living
things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet
remain the same.

Part II

Shopkeepers at War

i.

I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this
second chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun
flashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the
housetops, and London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling
down. Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger.
I do not mean that we are beaten or need be beaten. Almost
certainly the outcome depends on our own will. But at this moment
we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been brought
there by follies which we are still committing and which will drown
us altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism that
is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and
transport are owned privately and operated solely for
profit–DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact
had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing
ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter
the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be
impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got
one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and
proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe,
however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its
evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a
try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there
is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a
controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or
paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete
things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious
arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a
screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal horse-power stern to
stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once
and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the
fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved
that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is
necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused
words, Socialism and Fascism.

Socialism is usually defined as "common ownership of the means
of production". Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation,
owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT
mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as
clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods,
such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the
State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not
certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but
it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of
production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy
can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a
wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into
the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the
other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs,
because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a
profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not
exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and
does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the
amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes,
ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of
coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up
such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that "common
ownership of the means of production" is not in itself a sufficient
definition of Socialism. One must also add the following:
approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than
approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary
privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary
safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralised
ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are
living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control
over the government. "The State" may come to mean no more than a
self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can
return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism
that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it
efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in
common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished,
there are still capitalists and workers, and–this is the
important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the
world tend to sympathise with Fascism–generally speaking the
same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before
the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is
simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls
investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages.
The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical
purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect
a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere
EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and
obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most
powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from
that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a
world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality
of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The
driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human
INEQUALITY, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the
right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it
does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have
"proved" over and over again that only Nordic man is fully human,
have even mooted the idea that non Nordic peoples (such as
ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species
of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude
towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The
function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce
such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as
will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job
will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler's forthcoming
wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting
up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding
rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the
Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come
the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the
coloured peoples, the "semi-apes" as Hitler calls them, who are to
be reduced quite openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works
because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world
conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of
capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does
not work, because it is a competitive system in which private
profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which
all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests
of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of
the State.

All through the critical years British capitalism, with its
immense industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled
labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To prepare
for war on the modern scale you have got to divert the greater part
of your national income to armaments, which means cutting down on
consumption goods. A bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in
price to fifty small motor cars, or eighty thousand pairs of silk
stockings, or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can't have
MANY bombing planes without lowering the national standard of life.
It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in
Chamberlain's England the transition could not be made. The rich
would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still
visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily
either. Moreover, so long as PROFIT was the main object the
manufacturer had no incentive to change over from consumption goods
to armaments. A businessman's first duty is to his shareholders.
Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to
manufacture motor cars. To prevent war material from reaching the
enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest market is a
business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers
were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany
tin, rubber, copper and shellac-and this in the clear, certain
knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was
about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat
with. But it was "good business".

And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that
Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head
knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely a question of
how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER it was discovered that, so far as equipment
went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We
saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with
one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with
bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers
to supply all the officers. After a year of war the regular army
was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even, previously,
been a shortage of uniforms–this in one of the greatest
woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to
face a change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the
nature of Fascism and modern war. And false optimism was fed to the
general public by the gutter press, which lives on its
advertisements and is therefore interested in keeping trade
conditions normal. Year after year the Beaverbrook press assured us
in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO WAR, and as late as the
beginning of 1939 Lord Rothermere was describing Hitler as "a great
gentleman". And while England in the moment of disaster proved to
be short of every war material except ships, it is not recorded
that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats, gramophones,
lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone pretend
that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public
necessity is not still continuing? England fights for her life, but
business must fight for profits. You can hardly open a newspaper
without seeing the two contradictory processes happening side by
side. On the very same page you will find the Government urging you
to save and the seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend.
Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but
also buy Haig and Haig, Pond's Face Cream and Black Magic
Chocolates.

But one thing gives hope–the visible swing in public
opinion. If we can survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will
turn out to have been one of the great turning-points in English
history. In that spectacular disaster the working class, the middle
class and even a section of the business community could see the
utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before that the case
against capitalism had never been PROVED. Russia, the only
definitely Socialist country, was backward and far away. All
criticism broke itself against the rat-trap faces of bankers and
the brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where's
the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm
in their seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse
there came something that could not be laughed away, something that
neither chequebooks nor policemen were any use against-the bombing.
Zweee–BOOM! What's that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock
Exchange. Zweee–BOOM! Another acre of somebody's valuable
slum-property gone west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history
as the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of
its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were
uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there
was something wrong. It was a great step forward. From that time
onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince artificially
stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a
free-for-all in which the worst man wins-that job will never be
quite so ghastly again.

ii.

The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily
a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system
to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a
factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in
positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete
shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas–in the true
sense of the word, a revolution.

I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of
England, the patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through
almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head
could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of
that moment has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the
people are now ready for the vast changes that are necessary; but
those changes have not even begun to happen.

England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost
entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into
positions of command by right of birth. Few if any of these people
are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but
as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory. They
could not do it, even if their material interests did not
constantly trip them up. As I pointed out earlier, they have been
artificially stupefied. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of
money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the
old–that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they
are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was more
desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the
whole of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the
war of 1914-18 over again. All the old duds were back on the job,
twenty years older, with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay
was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing articles on
strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons.
It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that state of affairs has
barely altered. The shock of disaster brought a few able men like
Bevin to the front, but in general we are still commanded by people
who managed to live through the years 1931-9 without even
discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the
unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

As soon as one considers any problem of this war–and it
does not matter whether it is the widest aspect of strategy or the
tiniest detail of home organisation–one sees that the
necessary moves cannot be made while the social structure of
England remains what it is. Inevitably, because of their position
and upbringing, the ruling class are fighting for their own
privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled with the public
interest. It is a mistake to imagine that war aims, strategy,
propaganda and industrial organisation exist in watertight
compartments. All are interconnected. Every strategic plan, every
tactical method, even every weapon will bear the stamp of the
social system that produced it. The British ruling class are
fighting against Hitler, whom they have always regarded and whom
some of them still regard as their protector against Bolshevism.
That does not mean that they will deliberately sell out; but it
does mean that at every decisive moment they are likely to falter,
pull their punches, do the wrong thing.

Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to the
process, they have done the wrong thing with an unerring instinct
ever since 1931. They helped Franco to overthrow the Spanish
Government, although anyone not an imbecile could have told them
that a Fascist Spain would be hostile to England. They fed Italy
with war materials all through the winter of 1939-40, although it
was obvious to the whole world that the Italians were going to
attack us in the spring. For the sake of a few hundred thousand
dividend drawers they are turning India from an ally into an enemy.
Moreover, so long as the moneyed classes remain in control, we
cannot develop any but a DEFENSIVE strategy. Every victory means a
change in the STATUS QUO. How can we drive the Italians out of
Abyssinia without rousing echoes among the coloured peoples of our
own Empire? How can we even smash Hitler without the risk of
bringing the German Socialists and Communists into power? The
left-wingers who wail that "this is a capitalist war" and that
"British Imperialism" is fighting for loot have got their heads
screwed on backwards. The last thing the British moneyed class wish
for is to acquire fresh territory. It would simply be an
embarrassment. Their war aim (both unattainable and unmentionable)
is simply to hang on to what they have got.

Internally, England is still the rich man's Paradise. All talk
of "equality of sacrifice" is nonsense. At the same time as factory
workers are asked to put up with longer hours, advertisements for
"Butler. One in family, eight in staff" are appearing in the press.
The bombed-out populations of the East End go hungry and homeless
while wealthier victims simply step into their cars and flee to
comfortable country houses. The Home Guard swells to a million men
in a few weeks, and is deliberately organised from above in such a
way that only people with private incomes can hold positions of
command. Even the rationing system is so arranged that it hits the
poor all the time, while people with over £2,000 a year are
practically unaffected by it. Everywhere privilege is squandering
good will. In such circumstances even propaganda becomes almost
impossible. As attempts to stir up patriotic feeling, the red
posters issued by the Chamberlain Government at the beginning of
the war broke all depth-records. Yet they could not have been much
other than they were, for how could Chamberlain and his followers
take the risk of rousing strong popular feeling AGAINST FASCISM?
Anyone who was genuinely hostile to Fascism must also be opposed to
Chamberlain himself and to all the others who had helped Hitler
into power. So also with external propaganda. In all Lord Halifax's
speeches there is not one concrete proposal for which a single
inhabitant of Europe would risk the top joint of his little finger.
For what war-aim can Halifax, or anyone like him, conceivably have,
except to put the clock back to 1933?

It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English
people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and
street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it
happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time
and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The
people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable
of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though
it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are
among them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary
people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the
old. It is not primarily a question of change of government.
British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the
people, and if we alter our structure from below we shall get the
government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial
administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous
than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in
public. Right through our national life we have got to fight
against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted
public-schoolboy is better fitted for command than an intelligent
mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest INDIVIDUALS among
them, we have got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a
whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that
is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the
newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to
take charge of its own destiny.

In the short run, equality of sacrifice, "war-Communism", is
even more important than radical economic changes. It is very
necessary that industry should be nationalised, but it is more
urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers and "private
incomes" should disappear forthwith. Almost certainly the main
reason why the Spanish Republic could keep up the fight for two and
a half years against impossible odds was that there were no gross
contrasts of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all
suffered alike. When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the
general had not one either. Given equality of sacrifice, the morale
of a country like England would probably be unbreakable. But at
present we have nothing to appeal to except traditional patriotism,
which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not necessarily
bottomless. At some point or another you have got to deal with the
man who says "I should be no worse off under Hitler". But what
answer can you give him–that is, what answer that you can
expect him to listen to–while common soldiers risk their
lives for two and sixpence a day, and fat women ride about in
Rolls-Royce cars, nursing pekineses?

It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will
mean cruel overwork, cold dull winters, uninteresting food, lack of
amusements, prolonged bombing. It cannot but lower the general
standard of living, because the essential act of war is to
manufacture armaments instead of consumable goods. The working
class will have to suffer terrible things. And they WILL suffer
them, almost indefinitely, provided that they know what they are
fighting for. They are not cowards, and they are not even
internationally minded. They can stand all that the Spanish workers
stood, and more. But they will want some kind of proof that a
better life is ahead for themselves and their children. The one
sure earnest of that is that when they are taxed and overworked
they shall see that the rich are being hit even harder. And if the
rich squeal audibly, so much the better.

We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is not
true that public opinion has no power in England. It never makes
itself heard without achieving something; it has been responsible
for most of the changes for the better during the past six months.
But we have moved with glacier-like slowness, and we have learned
only from disasters. It took the fall of Paris to get rid of
Chamberlain and the unnecessary suffering of scores of thousands of
people in the East End to get rid or partially rid of Sir John
Anderson. It is not worth losing a battle in order to bury a
corpse. For we are fighting against swift evil intelligences, and
time presses, and:

history to the defeated May say Alas! but cannot alter or
pardon.

iii.

During the last six months there has been much talk of "the
Fifth Column". From time to time obscure lunatics have been jailed
for making speeches in favour of Hitler, and large numbers of
German refugees have been interned, a thing which has almost
certainly done us great harm in Europe. It is of course obvious
that the idea of a large, organised army of Fifth Columnists
suddenly appearing on the streets with weapons in their hands, as
in Holland and Belgium, is ridiculous. Nevertheless a Fifth Column
danger does exist. One can only consider it if one also considers
in what way England might be defeated.

It does not seem probable that air bombing can settle a major
war. England might well be invaded and conquered, but the invasion
would be a dangerous gamble, and if it happened and failed it would
probably leave us more united and less Blimp-ridden than before.
Moreover, if England were overrun by foreign troops the English
people would know that they had been beaten and would continue the
struggle. It is doubtful whether they could be held down
permanently, or whether Hitler wishes to keep an army of a million
men stationed in these islands. A government of
––,–– and –– (you can fill in
the names) would suit him better. The English can probably not be
bullied into surrender, but they might quite easily be bored,
cajoled or cheated into it, provided that, as at Munich, they did
not know that they were surrendering. It could happen most easily
when the war seemed to be going well rather than badly. The
threatening tone of so much of the German and Italian propaganda is
a psychological mistake. It only gets home on intellectuals. With
the general public the proper approach would be "Let's call it a
draw". It is when a peace-offer along THOSE lines is made that the
pro-Fascists will raise their voices.

But who are the pro-Fascists? The idea of a Hitler victory
appeals to the very rich, to the Communists, to Mosley's followers,
to the pacifists, and to certain sections among the Catholics.
Also, if things went badly enough on the Home Front, the whole of
the poorer section of the working class might swing round to a
position that was defeatist though not actively pro-Hitler.

In this motley list one can see the daring of German propaganda,
its willingness to offer everything to everybody. But the various
pro-Fascist forces are not consciously acting together, and they
operate in different ways.

The Communists must certainly be regarded as pro-Hitler, and are
bound to remain so unless Russian policy changes, but they have not
very much influence. Mosley's Blackshirts, though now lying very
low, are a more serious danger, because of the footing they
probably possess in the armed forces. Still, even in its palmiest
days Mosley's following can hardly have numbered 50,000. Pacifism
is a psychological curiosity rather than a political movement. Some
of the extremer pacifists, starting out with a complete
renunciation of violence, have ended by warmly championing Hitler
and even toying with Antisemitism. This is interesting, but it is
not important. "Pure" pacifism, which is a by-product of naval
power, can only appeal to people in very sheltered positions.
Moreover, being negative and irresponsible, it does not inspire
much devotion. Of the membership of the Peace Pledge Union, less
than 15 per cent even pay their annual subscriptions. None of these
bodies of people, pacifists, Communists or Blackshirts, could bring
a large scale stop-the-war movement into being by their own
efforts. But they might help to make things very much easier for a
treacherous government negotiating surrender. Like the French
Communists, they might become the half-conscious agents of
millionaires.

The real danger is from above. One ought not to pay any
attention to Hitler's recent line of talk about being the friend of
the poor man, the enemy of plutocracy, etc etc. Hitler's real self
is in MEIN KAMPF, and in his actions. He has never persecuted the
rich, except when they were Jews or when they tried actively to
oppose him. He stands for a centralised economy which robs the
capitalist of most of his power but leaves the structure of society
much as before. The State controls industry, but there are still
rich and poor, masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine
Socialism, the moneyed class have always been on his side. This was
crystal clear at the time of the Spanish civil war, and clear again
at the time when France surrendered. Hitler's puppet government are
not working men, but a gang of bankers, gaga generals and corrupt
right wing politicians.

That kind of spectacular, CONSCIOUS treachery is less likely to
succeed in England, indeed is far less likely even to be tried.
Nevertheless, to many payers of supertax this war is simply an
insane family squabble which ought to be stopped at all costs. One
need not doubt that a "peace" movement is on foot somewhere in high
places; probably a shadow Cabinet has already been formed. These
people will get their chance not in the moment of defeat but in
some stagnant period when boredom is reinforced by discontent. They
will not talk about surrender, only about peace; and doubtless they
will persuade themselves, and perhaps other people, that they are
acting for the best. An army of unemployed led by millionaires
quoting the Sermon on the Mount–that is our danger. But it
cannot arise when we have once introduced a reasonable degree of
social justice. The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to
morale than a fleet of Goering's bombing planes.

PART III: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

i.

The English revolution started several years ago, and it began
to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all
else in England, it happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is
happening. The war has speeded it up, but it has also increased,
and desperately, the necessity for speed.

Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with
party labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can
say that the old distinction between Right and Left broke down when
PICTURE POST was first published. What are the politics of PICTURE
POST? Or of CAVALCADE, or Priestley's broadcasts, or the leading
articles in the EVENING STANDARD? None of the old classifications
will fit them. They merely point to the existence of multitudes of
unlabelled people who have grasped within the last year or two that
something is wrong. But since a classless, ownerless society is
generally spoken of as "Socialism", we can give that name to the
society towards which we are now moving. The war and the revolution
are inseparable. We cannot establish anything that a western nation
would regard as Socialism without defeating Hitler; on the other
hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically and
socially in the nineteenth century. The past is fighting the future
and we have two years, a year, possibly only a few months, to see
to it that the future wins.

We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put
through the necessary changes of its own accord. The initiative
will have to come from below. That means that there will have to
arise something that has never existed in England, a Socialist
movement that actually has the mass of the people behind it. But
one must start by recognising why it is that English Socialism has
failed.

In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever
seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to
achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters
it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and
is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted to raising wages
and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the
critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of
British capitalism. In particular it was interested in the
maintenance of the British Empire, for the wealth of England was
drawn largely from Asia and Africa. The standard of living of the
trade union workers, whom the Labour Party represented, depended
indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. At the same time the
Labour Party was a Socialist party, using Socialist phraseology,
thinking in terms of an old-fashioned anti-imperialism and more or
less pledged to make restitution to the coloured races. It had to
stand for the "independence" of India, just as it had to stand for
disarmament and "progress" generally. Nevertheless everyone was
aware that this was nonsense. In the age of the tank and the
bombing plane, backward agricultural countries like India and the
African colonies can no more be independent than can a cat or a
dog. Had any Labour government come into office with a clear
majority and then proceeded to grant India anything that could
truly be called independence, India would simply have been absorbed
by Japan, or divided between Japan and Russia.

To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would
have been open. One was to continue administering the Empire
exactly as before, which meant dropping all pretensions to
Socialism. Another was to set the subject peoples "free", which
meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy and other
predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in
the British standard of living. The third was to develop a POSITIVE
imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a
federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of
the Union of Soviet Republics. But the Labour Party's history and
background made this impossible. It was a party of the trade
unions, hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in
imperial affairs and no contacts among the men who actually held
the Empire together. It would have had to hand the administration
of India and Africa and the whole job of imperial defence to men
drawn from a different class and traditionally hostile to
Socialism. Overshadowing everything was the doubt whether a Labour
government which meant business could make itself obeyed. For all
the size of its following, the Labour Party had no footing in the
navy, little or none in the army or air force, none whatever in the
Colonial Services, and not even a sure footing in the Home Civil
Service. In England its position was strong but not
unchallengeable, and outside England all the key points were in the
hands of its enemies. Once in power, the same dilemma would always
have faced it: carry out your promises, and risk revolt, or
continue with the same policy as the Conservatives, and stop
talking about Socialism. The Labour leaders never found a solution,
and from 1935 onwards it was very doubtful whether they had any
wish to take office. They had degenerated into a Permanent
Opposition.

Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist
parties, of whom the Communists were the strongest. The Communists
had considerable influence in the Labour Party in the years 1920-6
and 1935-9. Their chief importance, and that of the whole left wing
of the Labour movement, was the part they played in alienating the
middle classes from Socialism.

The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear
that Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of
Fascism is enormously greater. In one country after another the
Communists have been rooted out by their more up-to-date enemies,
the Nazis. In the English-speaking countries they never had a
serious footing. The creed they were spreading could appeal only to
a rather rare type of person, found chiefly in the middle-class
intelligentsia, the type who has ceased to love his own country but
still feels the need of patriotism, and therefore develops
patriotic sentiments towards Russia. By 1940, after working for
twenty years and spending a great deal of money, the British
Communists had barely 20,000 members, actually a smaller number
than they had started out with in 1920. The other Marxist parties
were of even less importance. They had not the Russian money and
prestige behind them, and even more than the Communists they were
tied to the nineteenth-century doctrine of the class war. They
continued year after year to preach this out-of-date gospel, and
never drew any inference from the fact that it got them no
followers.

Nor did any strong native Fascist movement grow up. Material
conditions were not bad enough, and no leader who could be taken
seriously was forthcoming. One would have had to look a long time
to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was
as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not
offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was
imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme
from Italy and the salute from Germany, with the Jew baiting tacked
on as an afterthought, Mosley having actually started his movement
with Jews among his most prominent followers. A man of the stamp of
Bottomley or Lloyd George could perhaps have brought a real British
Fascist movement into existence. But such leaders only appear when
the psychological need for them exists.

After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment, the entire
English Socialist movement was unable to produce a version of
Socialism which the mass of the people could even find desirable.
The Labour Party stood for a timid reformism, the Marxists were
looking at the modern world through nineteenth-century spectacles.
Both ignored agriculture and imperial problems, and both
antagonised the middle classes. The suffocating stupidity of
left-wing propaganda had frightened away whole classes of necessary
people, factory managers, airmen, naval officers, farmers,
white-collar workers, shopkeepers, policemen. All of these people
had been taught to think of Socialism as something which menaced
their livelihood, or as something seditious, alien, "anti-British"
as they would have called it. Only the intellectuals, the least
useful section of the middle class, gravitated towards the
movement.

A Socialist Party which genuinely wished to achieve anything
would have started by facing several facts which to this day are
considered unmentionable in left-wing circles. It would have
recognised that England is more united than most countries, that
the British workers have a great deal to lose besides their chains,
and that the differences in outlook and habits between class and
class are rapidly diminishing. In general, it would have recognised
that the old-fashioned "proletarian revolution" is an
impossibility. But all through the between-war years no Socialist
programme that was both revolutionary and workable ever appeared;
basically, no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any major
change to happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and on,
drawing their salaries and periodically swapping jobs with the
Conservatives. The Communists wanted to go on and on, suffering a
comfortable martyrdom, meeting with endless defeats and afterwards
putting the blame on other people. The left-wing intelligentsia
wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at
middle-class morale, but still keeping their favoured position as
hangers-on of the dividend-drawers. Labour Party politics had
become a variant of Conservatism, "revolutionary" politics had
become a game of make-believe.

Now, however, the circumstances have changed, the drowsy years
have ended. Being a Socialist no longer means kicking theoretically
against a system which in practice you are fairly well satisfied
with. This time our predicament is real. It is "the Philistines be
upon thee, Samson". We have got to make our words take physical
shape, or perish. We know very well that with its present social
structure England cannot survive, and we have got to make other
people see that fact and act upon it. We cannot win the war without
introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the
war. At such a time it is possible, as it was not in the peaceful
years, to be both revolutionary and realistic. A Socialist movement
which can swing the mass of the people behind it, drive the
pro-Fascists out of positions of control, wipe out the grosser
injustices and let the working class see that they have something
to fight for, win over the middle classes instead of antagonising
them, produce a workable imperial policy instead of a mixture of
humbug and Utopianism, bring patriotism and intelligence into
partnership–for the first time, a movement of such a kind
becomes possible.

ii.

The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook
word into a realisable policy.

The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over
Europe. Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London.
Patriotism, against which the Socialists fought so long, has become
a tremendous lever in their hands. People who at any other time
would cling like glue to their miserable scraps of privilege, will
surrender them fast enough when their country is in danger. War is
the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes,
wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.
Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not
altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this
that men will die on the field of battle. At this moment it is not
so much a question of surrendering life as of surrendering leisure,
comfort, economic liberty, social prestige. There are very few
people in England who really want to see their country conquered by
Germany. If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler means wiping
out class privilege, the great mass of middling people, the
£6 a week to £2,000 a year class, will probably be on
our side. These people are quite indispensable, because they
include most of the technical experts. Obviously the snobbishness
and political ignorance of people like airmen and naval officers
will be a very great difficulty. But without those airmen,
destroyer commanders, etc etc we could not survive for a week. The
only approach to them is through their patriotism. An intelligent
Socialist movement will use their patriotism, instead of merely
insulting it, as hitherto.

But do I mean that there will be no opposition? Of course not.
It would be childish to expect anything of the kind.

There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be
unconscious and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point
or other it may be necessary to use violence. It is easy to imagine
a pro-Fascist rebellion breaking out in, for instance, India. We
shall have to fight against bribery, ignorance and snobbery. The
bankers and the larger businessmen, the landowners and
dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile bottoms, will
obstruct for all they are worth. Even the middle classes will
writhe when their accustomed way of life is menaced. But just
because the English sense of national unity has never
disintegrated, because patriotism is finally stronger than
class-hatred, the chances are that the will of the majority will
prevail. It is no use imagining that one can make fundamental
changes without causing a split in the nation; but the treacherous
minority will be far smaller in time of war than it would be at any
other time.

The swing of opinion is visibly happening, but it cannot be
counted on to happen fast enough of its own accord. This war is a
race between the consolidation of Hitler's empire and the growth of
democratic consciousness. Everywhere in England you can see a
ding-dong battle ranging to and fro–in Parliament and in the
Government, in the factories and the armed forces, in the pubs and
the air-raid shelters, in the newspapers and on the radio. Every
day there are tiny defeats, tiny victories. Morrison for Home
Security–a few yards forward. Priestley shoved off the
air–a few yards back. It is a struggle between the groping
and the unteachable, between the young and the old, between the
living and the dead. But it is very necessary that the discontent
which undoubtedly exists should take a purposeful and not merely
obstructive form. It is time for THE PEOPLE to define their
war-aims. What is wanted is a simple, concrete programme of action,
which can be given all possible publicity, and round which public
opinion can group itself.

I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of
thing we need. The first three points deal with England's internal
policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:

1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major
industries.

2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax
free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten
to one.

3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.

4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede
when the war is over.

5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the
coloured peoples are to be represented.

6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all
other victims of the Fascist powers.

The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims
quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and
England into a Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in
it nothing that the simplest person could not understand and see
the reason for. In the form in which I have put it, it could be
printed on the front page of the DAILY MIRROR. But for the purposes
of this book a certain amount of amplification is needed.

1. NATIONALISATION. One can "nationalise" industry by the stroke
of a pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is
needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be
formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once
that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere
OWNERS who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the
possession of title-deeds and share certificates. State-ownership
implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without working. How
sudden a change in the conduct of industry it implies is less
certain. In a country like England we cannot rip down the whole
structure and build again from the bottom, least of all in time of
war. Inevitably the majority of industrial concerns will continue
with much the same personnel as before, the one-time owners or
managing directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees.
There is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists would
actually welcome some such arrangement. The resistance will come
from the big capitalists, the bankers, the landlords and the idle
rich, roughly speaking the class with over £2,000 a
year–and even if one counts in all their dependants there are
not more than half a million of these people in England.
Nationalisation of agricultural land implies cutting out the
landlord and the tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering with
the farmer. It is difficult to imagine any reorganisation of
English agriculture that would not retain most of the existing
farms as units, at any rate at the beginning. The farmer, when he
is competent, will continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually
that already, with the added disadvantage of having to make a
profit and being permanently in debt to the bank. With certain
kinds of petty trading, and even the small-scale ownership of land,
the State will probably not interfere at all. It would be a great
mistake to start by victimising the smallholder class, for
instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they are
competent, and the amount of work they do depends on the feeling
that they are "their own masters". But the State will certainly
impose an upward limit to the ownership of land (probably fifteen
acres at the very most), and will never permit any ownership of
land in town areas.

From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the
property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot
feel now, that the State is THEMSELVES. They will be ready then to
endure the sacrifices that are ahead of us, war or no war. And even
if the face of England hardly seems to change, on the day that our
main industries are formally nationalised the dominance of a single
class will have been broken. From then onwards the emphasis will be
shifted from ownership to management, from privilege to competence.
It is quite possible that State-ownership will in itself bring
about less social change than will be forced upon us by the common
hardships of war. But it is the necessary first step without which
any REAL reconstruction is impossible.

2. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a
minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based
simply on the amount of consumption goods available. And this again
implies a stricter rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is
no use at this stage of the world's history to suggest that all
human beings should have EXACTLY equal incomes. It has been shown
over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is
no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money
reward need not be very large. In practice it is impossible that
earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have suggested.
There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no reason
why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And
within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with
£3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel
themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the
sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot.

3. EDUCATION. In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be
promise rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a
position to raise the school-leaving age or increase the teaching
staffs of the elementary schools. But there are certain immediate
steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system.
We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and
the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils
chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present, public-school
education is partly a training in class prejudice and partly a sort
of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class in return for
the right to enter certain professions. It is true that that state
of affairs is altering. The middle classes have begun to rebel
against the expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt
the majority of the public schools if it continues for another year
or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But
there is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be
able to weather the financial storm longest, will survive in some
form or another as festering centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000
"private" schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them
deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial
undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is actually
lower than that of the elementary schools. They merely exist
because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in
being educated by the public authorities. The State could quell
this idea by declaring itself responsible for all education, even
if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We need gestures
as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of
"defending democracy" is nonsense while it is a mere accident of
birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get
the education it deserves.

4. INDIA. What we must offer India is not "freedom", which, as I
have said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership-in a
word, equality. But we must also tell the Indians that they are
free to secede, if they want to. Without that there can be no
equality of partnership, and our claim to be defending the coloured
peoples against Fascism will never be believed. But it is a mistake
to imagine that if the Indians were free to cut themselves adrift
they would immediately do so. When a British government OFFERS them
unconditional independence, they will refuse it. For as soon as
they have the power to secede the chief reasons for doing so will
have disappeared.

A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster
for India no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this.
As things are at present, India not only cannot defend itself, it
is hardly even capable of feeding itself. The whole administration
of the country depends on a framework of experts (engineers, forest
officers, railwaymen, soldiers, doctors) who are predominantly
English and could not be replaced within five or ten years.
Moreover, English is the chief lingua franca and nearly the whole
of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply Anglicised. Any transference
to foreign rule–for if the British marched out of India the
Japanese and other powers would immediately march in–would
mean an immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese, the Russians,
the Germans nor the Italians would be capable of administering
India even at the low level of efficiency that is attained by the
British. They do not possess the necessary supplies of technical
experts or the knowledge of languages and local conditions, and
they probably could not win the confidence of indispensable
go-betweens such as the Eurasians. If India were simply
"liberated", i.e. deprived of British military protection, the
first result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a
series of enormous famines which would kill millions of people
within a few years.

What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution
without British interference, but in some kind of partnership that
ensures its military protection and technical advice. This is
unthinkable until there is a Socialist government in England. For
at least eighty years England has artificially prevented the
development of India, partly from fear of trade competition if
Indian industries were too highly developed, partly because
backward peoples are more easily governed than civilised ones. It
is a commonplace that the average Indian suffers far more from his
own countrymen than from the British. The petty Indian capitalist
exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness, the peasant
lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender. But all
this is an indirect result of the British rule, which aims
half-consciously at keeping India as backward as possible. The
classes most loyal to Britain are the princes, the landowners and
the business community–in general, the reactionary classes
who are doing fairly well out of the STATUS QUO. The moment that
England ceased to stand towards India in the relation of an
exploiter, the balance of forces would be altered. No need then for
the British to flatter the ridiculous Indian princes, with their
gilded elephants and cardboard armies, to prevent the growth of the
Indian trade unions, to play off Moslem against Hindu, to protect
the worthless life of the money-lender, to receive the salaams of
toadying minor officials, to prefer the half-barbarous Gurkha to
the educated Bengali. Once check that stream of dividends that
flows from the bodies of Indian coolies to the banking accounts of
old ladies in Cheltenham, and the whole sahib-native nexus, with
its haughty ignorance on one side and envy and servility on the
other, can come to an end. Englishmen and Indians can work side by
side for the development of India, and for the training of Indians
in all the arts which, so far, they have been systematically
prevented from learning. How many of the existing British personnel
in India, commercial or official, would fall in with such an
arrangement–which would mean ceasing once and for all to be
"sahibs"–is a different question. But, broadly speaking, more
is to be hoped from the younger men and from those officials (civil
engineers, forestry and agricultural experts, doctors,
educationists) who have been scientifically educated. The higher
officials, the provincial governors, commissioners, judges, etc are
hopeless; but they are also the most easily replaceable.

That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it
were offered to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of
partnership on equal terms until such time as the world has ceased
to be ruled by bombing planes. But we must add to it the
unconditional right to secede. It is the only way of proving that
we mean what we say. And what applies to India applies, MUTATIS
MUTANDIS, to Burma, Malaya and most of our African possessions.

5 and 6 explain themselves. They are the necessary preliminary
to any claim that we are fighting this war for the protection of
peaceful peoples against Fascist aggression.

Is it impossibly hopeful to think that such a policy as this
could get a following in England? A year ago, even six months ago,
it would have been, but not now. Moreover-and this is the peculiar
opportunity of this moment–it could be given the necessary
publicity. There is now a considerable weekly press, with a
circulation of millions, which would be ready to
popularise–if not EXACTLY the programme I have sketched
above, at any rate SOME policy along those lines. There are even
three or four daily papers which would be prepared to give it a
sympathetic hearing. That is the distance we have travelled in the
last six months.

But is such a policy realisable? That depends entirely on
ourselves.

Some of the points I have suggested are of the kind that could
be carried out immediately, others would take years or decades and
even then would not be perfectly achieved. No political programme
is ever carried out in its entirety. But what matters is that that
or something like it should be our declared policy. It is always
the DIRECTION that counts. It is of course quite hopeless to expect
the present Government to pledge itself to any policy that implies
turning this war into a revolutionary war. It is at best a
government of compromise, with Churchill riding two horses like a
circus acrobat. Before such measures as limitation of incomes
become even thinkable, there will have to be a complete shift of
power away from the old ruling class. If during this winter the war
settles into another stagnant period, we ought in my opinion to
agitate for a General Election, a thing which the Tory Party
machine will make frantic efforts to prevent. But even without an
election we can get the government we want, provided that we want
it urgently enough. A real shove from below will accomplish it. As
to who will be in that government when it comes, I make no guess. I
only know that the right men will be there when the people really
want them, for it is movements that make leaders and not leaders
movements.

Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are still
unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that has never
existed before, a specifically ENGLISH Socialist movement. Hitherto
there has been only the Labour Party, which was the creation of the
working class but did not aim at any fundamental change, and
Marxism, which was a German theory interpreted by Russians and
unsuccessfully transplanted to England. There was nothing that
really touched the heart of the English people. Throughout its
entire history the English Socialist movement has never produced a
song with a catchy tune–nothing like LA MARSEILLAISE or LA
CUCURACHA, for instance. When a Socialist movement native to
England appears, the Marxists, like all others with a vested
interest in the past, will be its bitter enemies. Inevitably they
will denounce it as "Fascism". Already it is customary among the
more soft-boiled intellectuals of the Left to declare that if we
fight against the Nazis we shall "go Nazi" ourselves. They might
almost equally well say that if we fight against Negroes we shall
turn black. To "go Nazi" we should have to have the history of
Germany behind us. Nations do not escape from their past merely by
making a revolution. An English Socialist government will transform
the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over it
the unmistakable marks of our own civilisation, the peculiar
civilisation which I discussed earlier in this book.

It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish
the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the
Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the
judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn
on the soldier's cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class
dictatorship. It will group itself round the old Labour Party and
its mass following will be in the trade unions, but it will draw
into it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of
the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing brains will come from the
new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts,
airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel
at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose
touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that
is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a
solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It
will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will
interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political
parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects
will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little
impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not
persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the
Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England
as "a Christian country". The Catholic Church will war against it,
but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church
will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a power of
assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and
sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.

But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It will
have nationalised industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless
educational system. Its real nature will be apparent from the
hatred which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it.
It will aim not at disintegrating the Empire but at turning it into
a federation of Socialist states, freed not so much from the
British flag as from the money-lender, the dividend-drawer and the
woodenheaded British official. Its war strategy will be totally
different from that of any property-ruled state, because it will
not be afraid of the revolutionary after-effects when any existing
régime is brought down. It will not have the smallest
scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native
rebellion in enemy colonies. It will fight in such a way that even
if it is beaten its memory will be dangerous to the victor, as the
memory of the French Revolution was dangerous to Metternich's
Europe. The dictators will fear it as they could not fear the
existing British régime, even if its military strength were
ten times what it is.

But at this moment, when the drowsy life of England has barely
altered, and the offensive contrast of wealth and poverty still
exists everywhere, even amid the bombs, why do I dare to say that
all these things "will" happen?

Because the time has come when one can predict the future in
terms of an "either–or". Either we turn this war into a
revolutionary war (I do not say that our policy will be EXACTLY
what I have indicated above–merely that it will be along
those general lines) or we lose it, and much more besides. Quite
soon it will be possible to say definitely that our feet are set
upon one path or the other. But at any rate it is certain that with
our present social structure we cannot win. Our real forces,
physical, moral or intellectual, cannot be mobilised.

iii.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually
the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something
that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.
It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real
revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.

During the past twenty years the negative, FAINÉANT
outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the
sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage,
the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a
hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done
nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been
living in the squashy League of Nations universe that these people
imagined. In an age of Fuehrers and bombing planes it was a
disaster. However little we may like it, toughness is the price of
survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot survive
amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and whose
chief national industry is war. English Socialists of nearly all
colours have wanted to make a stand against Fascism, but at the
same time they have aimed at making their own countrymen unwarlike.
They have failed, because in England traditional loyalties are
stronger than new ones. But in spite of all the "anti-Fascist"
heroics of the left-wing press, what chance should we have stood
when the real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman
had been the kind of creature that the NEW STATESMAN, the DAILY
WORKER or even the NEWS CHRONICLE wished to make him?

Up to 1935 virtually all English left-wingers were vaguely
pacifist. After 1935 the more vocal of them flung themselves
eagerly into the Popular Front movement, which was simply an
evasion of the whole problem posed by Fascism. It set out to be
"anti-Fascist" in a purely negative way–"against" Fascism
without being "for" any discoverable policy-and underneath it lay
the flabby idea that when the time came the Russians would do our
fighting for us. It is astonishing how this illusion fails to die.
Every week sees its spate of letters to the press, pointing out
that if we had a government with no Tories in it the Russians could
hardly avoid coming round to our side. Or we are to publish
high-sounding war-aims (VIDE books like UNSER KAMPF, A HUNDRED
MILLION ALLIES–IF WE CHOOSE, etc), whereupon the European
populations will infallibly rise on our behalf. It is the same idea
all the time-look abroad for your inspiration, get someone else to
do your fighting for you. Underneath it lies the frightful
inferiority complex of the English intellectual, the belief that
the English are no longer a martial race, no longer capable of
enduring.

In truth there is no reason to think that anyone will do our
fighting for us yet awhile, except the Chinese, who have been doing
it for three years already. [Note: Written before the outbreak of
the war in Greece. (Author's footnote.)] The Russians may be driven
to fight on our side by the fact of a direct attack, but they have
made it clear enough that they will not stand up to the German army
if there is any way of avoiding it. In any case they are not likely
to be attracted by the spectacle of a left-wing government in
England. The present Russian régime must almost certainly be
hostile to any revolution in the West. The subject peoples of
Europe will rebel when Hitler begins to totter, but not earlier.
Our potential allies are not the Europeans but on the one hand the
Americans, who will need a year to mobilise their resources even if
Big Business can be brought to heel, and on the other hand the
coloured peoples, who cannot be even sentimentally on our side till
our own revolution has started. For a long time, a year, two years,
possibly three years, England has got to be the shock-absorber of
the world. We have got to face bombing, hunger, overwork,
influenza, boredom and treacherous peace offers. Manifestly it is a
time to stiffen morale, not to weaken it. Instead of taking the
mechanically anti-British attitude which is usual on the Left, it
is better to consider what the world would really be like if the
English-speaking culture perished. For it is childish to suppose
that the other English-speaking countries, even the USA, will be
unaffected if Britain is conquered.

Lord Halifax, and all his tribe, believe that when the war is
over things will be exactly as they were before. Back to the crazy
pavement of Versailles, back to "democracy", i.e. capitalism, back
to dole queues and the Rolls-Royce cars, back to the grey top hats
and the sponge-bag trousers, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM. It is of course
obvious that nothing of the kind is going to happen. A feeble
imitation of it might just possibly happen in the case of a
negotiated peace, but only for a short while. LAISSEZ-FAIRE
capitalism is dead. [Note, below] The choice lies between the kind
of collective society that Hitler will set up and the kind that can
arise if he is defeated.

[Note: It is interesting to notice that Mr Kennedy, USA
Ambassador in London, remarked on his return to New York in October
1940 that as a result of the war "democracy is finished". By
"democracy", of course, he meant private capitalism. (Author's
footnote.)]

If Hitler wins this war he will consolidate his rule over
Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and if his armies have not been
too greatly exhausted beforehand, he will wrench vast territories
from Soviet Russia. He will set up a graded caste-society in which
the German HERRENVOLK ("master race" or "aristocratic race") will
rule over Slavs and other lesser peoples whose job it will be to
produce low-priced agricultural products. He will reduce the
coloured peoples once and for all to outright slavery. The real
quarrel of the Fascist powers with British imperialism is that they
know that it is disintegrating. Another twenty years along the
present line of development, and India will be a peasant republic
linked with England only by voluntary alliance. The "semi-apes" of
whom Hitler speaks with such loathing will be flying aeroplanes and
manufacturing machine-guns. The Fascist dream of a slave empire
will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are defeated we simply
hand over our own victims to new masters who come fresh to the job
and have not developed any scruples.

But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two
incompatible visions of life are fighting one another. "Between
democracy and totalitarianism," says Mussolini, "there can be no
compromise." The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time,
live side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very
imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The
whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human
equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we
or the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the
IDEA is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality.
From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a society
of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is
precisely the idea of human equality–the "Jewish" or
"Judaeo-Christian" idea of equality–that Hitler came into the
world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The
thought of a world in which black men would be as good as white men
and Jews treated as human beings brings him the same horror and
despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to us.

It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these two
viewpoints are. Some time within the next year a pro-Hitler
reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia is likely enough.
There are premonitory signs of it already. Hitler's positive
achievement appeals to the emptiness of these people, and, in the
case of those with pacifist leanings, to their masochism. One knows
in advance more or less what they will say. They will start by
refusing to admit that British capitalism is evolving into
something different, or that the defeat of Hitler can mean any more
than a victory for the British and American millionaires. And from
that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is "just
the same as" or "just as bad as" totalitarianism. There is NOT MUCH
freedom of speech in England; therefore there is NO MORE than
exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience;
therefore it is NO WORSE to be in the torture-chambers of the
Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the
same as no bread.

But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and
totalitarianism, it is not true that they are the same. It would
not be true, even if British democracy were incapable of evolving
beyond its present stage. The whole conception of the militarised
continental state, with its secret police, its censored literature
and its conscript labour, is utterly different from that of the
loose maritime democracy, with its slums and unemployment, its
strikes and party politics. It is the difference between land power
and sea power, between cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and
self-deception, between the SS man and the rent-collector. And in
choosing between them one chooses not so much on the strength of
what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming. But in a
sense it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its higher or at its
lowest, is "better" than totalitarianism. To decide that one would
have to have access to absolute standards. The only question that
matters is where one's real sympathies will lie when the pinch
comes. The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy
against totalitarianism and "proving" that one is as bad as the
other are simply frivolous people who have never been shoved up
against realities. They show the same shallow misunderstanding of
Fascism now, when they are beginning to flirt with it, as a year or
two ago, when they were squealing against it. The question is not,
"Can you make out a debating-society 'case' in favour of Hitler?"
The question is, "Do you genuinely accept that case? Are you
willing to submit to Hitler's rule? Do you want to see England
conquered, or don't you?" It would be better to be sure on that
point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For there is no
such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help one side
or the other.

When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western tradition can
accept the Fascist vision of life. It is important to realise that
now, and to grasp what it entails. With all its sloth, hypocrisy
and injustice, the English speaking civilisation is the only large
obstacle in Hitler's path. It is a living contradiction of all the
"infallible" dogmas of Fascism. That is why all Fascist writers for
years past have agreed that England's power must be destroyed.
England must be "exterminated", must be "annihilated", must "cease
to exist". Strategically it would be possible for this war to end
with Hitler in secure possession of Europe, and with the British
Empire intact and British sea-power barely affected. But
ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an offer
along those lines, it could only be treacherously, with a view to
conquering England indirectly or renewing the attack at some more
favourable moment. England cannot possibly be allowed to remain as
a sort of funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the
Atlantic flow into the police states of Europe. And turning it
round to our own point of view, we see the vastness of the issue
before us, the all-importance of preserving our democracy more or
less as we have known it. But to PRESERVE is always to EXTEND. The
choice before us is not so much between victory and defeat as
between revolution and apathy. If the thing we are fighting for is
altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our own
act.

It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of
Socialism, turn this war into a revolutionary war, and still be
defeated. That is at any rate thinkable. But, terrible as it would
be for anyone who is now adult, it would be far less deadly than
the "compromise peace" which a few rich men and their hired liars
are hoping for. The final ruin of England could only be
accomplished by an English government acting under orders from
Berlin. But that cannot happen if England has awakened beforehand.
For in that case the defeat would be unmistakable, the struggle
would continue, the IDEA would survive. The difference between
going down fighting, and surrendering without a fight, is by no
means a question of "honour" and schoolboy heroics. Hitler said
once that to ACCEPT defeat destroys the soul of a nation. This
sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it is strictly true. The
defeat of 1870 did not lessen the world-influence of France. The
Third Republic had more influence, intellectually, than the France
of Napoleon III. But the sort of peace that Petain, Laval and Co
have accepted can only be purchased by deliberately wiping out the
national culture. The Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious
independence only on condition that it destroys the distinctive
marks of French culture: republicanism, secularism, respect for the
intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We cannot be UTTERLY
defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We may see
German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process,
ultimately deadly to the German power-dream, will have been
started. The Spanish people were defeated, but the things they
learned during those two and a half memorable years will one day
come back upon the Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.

A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the
beginning of the war. Even Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my
memory does not deceive me:

Come the four corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true.

It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has
got to be true to herself. She is not being true to herself while
the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in
concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes
to dodge their Excess Profits Tax. It is goodbye to the TATLER and
the BYSTANDER, and farewell to the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The
heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They
are in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed
forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at
present they are still kept under by a generation of ghosts.
Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface,
even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary.
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no
question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging
"democracy", standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add
to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we
must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe
that we shall go forward.

WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE (1941)

"In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a
stupendous knockout blow at Britain...What Hitler has to do it
with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources
are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians' before
they were put to the test in Greece and Africa."

"The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the
times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or
worn out."

"In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind
that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the
sort... Yet our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In
their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in
discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive 'blow' through
Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march
from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or 'crush Russia',
or 'pour' over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the
phantom does none of these things–for one excellent reason.
It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and
munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it and
fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw
jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation
that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to
roost."

These quotations are not taken from the CAVALRY QUARTERLY but
from a series of newspaper articles by Mr H.G. Wells, written at
the beginning of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled
GUIDE TO THE NEW WORLD. Since they were written, the German army
has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march
through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has
undertaken the invasion of Russia. How that campaign will turn out
I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German general
staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have
begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within
three months. So much for the idea that the German army is a bogey,
its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc etc.

What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in
Berlin"? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey
Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human
rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now
especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is
the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without
interruption for the past forty years, always with an air of angry
surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so
obvious.

What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of
the air? The whole question is how we are to get it. What is the
use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters
is that not one of the five great military powers would think of
submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have
been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the
sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition
to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler
has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in
tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to
overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more,
whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view
which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to
shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world
reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler,
which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same
as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to
"enlightened" and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its
feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about
a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism,
the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are
superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object
of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling
down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men
patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are
the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In
part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism,
but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of the
Fatherland", etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly
altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs
from emotions–racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief,
love of war–which liberal intellectuals mechanically write
off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so
completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively,
the Holy Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the
intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is
merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All
that this idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of
English life. The Left Book Club was at bottom a product of
Scotland Yard, just as the Peace Pledge Union is a product of the
navy. One development of the last ten years has been the appearance
of the "political book", a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining
history with political criticism, as an important literary form.
But the best writers in this line–Trotsky, Rauschning,
Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others–have none of
them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been renegades
from one or other extremist party, who have seen totalitarianism at
close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution. Only
in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe,
right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant
lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard. Mr Wells, it will
be seen from the quotations I have given above, believes something
of the kind still. I do not suppose that either the bombs or the
German campaign in Greece have altered his opinion. A lifelong
habit of thought stands between him and an understanding of
Hitler's power.

Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle
class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the
throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has
an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side
of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda
against horses. The principal villain of his OUTLINE OF HISTORY is
the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any
book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same
idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man
of science who is working towards a planned World State and the
reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels,
Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always
more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress,
internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the
other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek
professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of
victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he
is probably right in assuming that a "reasonable", planned form of
society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will
prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from
assuming that it is just round the corner. There survives somewhere
or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells
and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses
Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the
Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood etc, but of merely
fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense
and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself
would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks,
however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks may
have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard
them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not
introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like
the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened
by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an
inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the
war-lords and witch doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore,
argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature
doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the
equation of science with common sense does not really hold good.
The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising
influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping
bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more
scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells
has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.
The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the
steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the
service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting
on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for
Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which
his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST
fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century
liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST
triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger.
That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of
history, like a Jacobite restoration.

But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age
(thirty-eight) to find fault with H.G. Wells? Thinking people who
were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense
Wells's own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and
especially a "popular" writer whose work takes effect quickly, is
questionable, but I doubt whether anyone who was writing books
between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language,
influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore
the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had
never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided
imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the
Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When
Wells was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was
not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious
people, predatory businessmen, dull squires, bishops, politicians
who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory.
Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition
and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there was need
of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to
discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants,
clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to
"get on or get out", your parents systematically warping your
sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over
their Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell
you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea,
and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable
people imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically
feasible Wells knew that within a little while men would be able to
fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to be able to fly, and
therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue.
On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the
Wright brothers had actually lifted their machine off the ground
for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted opinion was that if
God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914
Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his
vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising
extent.

But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a
non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous
strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by
fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of
understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal
loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would
describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come
marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any
rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who
have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who
have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in
themselves. A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty
years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW
WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. If one had to choose among
Wells's own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as
a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the
evil voices of power and military "glory". Kipling would have
understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin,
whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to
understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class
novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the
other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has
squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it
is, after all, to have any talents to squander.

LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)

1.

First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and
the surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came
afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called
training that we received before being sent to the front–the
huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and
cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the
filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the Trousered
militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early
mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic
interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro
Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech,
Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men
because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who
were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by
this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. Two of them I
know to be dead. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the
youngest sixteen.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to
escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an
overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them
if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary
bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil
war. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad
enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished
stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your
feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of
other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these
latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to
recur: 'Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending
Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something,
and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it
could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.' Many other
things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom
and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps
of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack
of sleep indulge in.

The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier
will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is
barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting
in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies.
Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary,
the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of
superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is substantially true. Bullets hurt,
corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet
their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an
army springs will colour its training, tactics and general
efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right
can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population
more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near
the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or,
above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the
war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a 'red' army any
more than for a 'white' one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a
bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be
just.

Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because
the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly
unaware of it then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays,
but look back a bit, dig out the files of NEW MASSES or the DAILY
WORKER, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that
our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old
phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid
with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not
bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns,
Garvins ET HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the
very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the
'glory' of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of
a few names would have fitted into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there
was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it
was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all
corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the
same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in
certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937
were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get
back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left
intelligentsia made their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is
glorious' not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without
any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other
transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of
people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved
the 'King and Country' declaration in 1935, shouted for a' firm
line against Germany' in 1937, supported the People's Convention in
1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of
opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on
and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.
In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money
and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be 'pro-war'
or 'anti-war', but in either case they have no realistic picture of
war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they
knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be
killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the
Spanish Republican army the experience of war was somehow not
degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less
irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see that
they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the
Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the
obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to
fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it
is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the
sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly
diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down
shows what the years of RENTIER capitalism have done to us.

2.

In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on
atrocities.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the
Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the
Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the
Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever
since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely
on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the
atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side,
without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up
a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the
present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring
somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the
Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And
stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse
itself and yesterday's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become
a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has
changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our
'atrocity campaign' was done largely before the war started, and
done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves
on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the
atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly
refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it
was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories,
while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the
Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the
Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left
had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and
were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British
simultaneously; partly also because official war-propaganda, with
its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to
make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price
we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated
pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you
were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany
bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the
denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I
don't think I ever once heard the question, 'What would have
happened if Germany had won?' even mentioned, let alone discussed.
So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth
when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people
who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in
Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about
Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the
Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue
because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than
that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is
that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for
scepticism–that the same horror stories come up in war after
war–merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are
true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an
opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has
ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that
what one may roughly call the 'whites' commit far more and worse
atrocities than the 'reds'. There is not the slightest doubt, for
instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is
there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the
last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and
a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and
radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep
one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they
happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures
in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung
into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish
roads–they all happened, and they did not happen any the less
because the DAILY TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them when
it is five years too late.

3.

Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the
second, I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere
of a revolutionary period:

Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the
Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here
lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would
not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a
shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the
ground between was a flat beet field with no cover except a few
ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and
return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time
no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the
dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of
flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an
uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our
aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably
carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and
was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained
from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely
to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the
Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did
not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had
come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his
trousers isn't a 'Fascist', he is visibly a fellow-creature,
similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because
it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The
other is different. I don't suppose that in telling it I can make
it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is
moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere
of a particular moment in time.

One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks
was a wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was
ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I
dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular–the arm outstretched, the palm
vertical–was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a
bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap at that
time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this
to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned
promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five
pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer
instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They
were very hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people
could be shot for it. The wretched boy allowed himself to be led
off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was that
he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of
his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he had
been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a
humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and
his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the
money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most
painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his
innocence had been established. That night I took him to the
pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was
horrible–I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money.
For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that
could not be wiped out.

Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of
the men in my section. By this time I was a 'cabo', or corporal, in
command of twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and
the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts.
One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he
said quite truly was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble
creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards
his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for
Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do. Instantly
I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men:' Fascist! Fascist! Let
that man go! This isn't a bourgeois army. Fascist!' etc., etc. As
best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got
to be obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous
arguments by means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in
revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most
warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was
happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending
me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming,
'He's the best corporal we've got!' (NO HAY CABO COMO EL!) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal
circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever
to be re-established between this boy and myself. The implied
accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of
safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes
all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as
painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in
Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It was a time
when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they
ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not
really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured
revolutionary posters, the universal use of the word 'comrade', the
anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper and sold for a penny,
the phrases like 'international proletarian solidarty',
pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean
something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up
for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in
his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from
him? No, you couldn't; but you might if you had both been through
some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the
by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the
beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to
failure.

4.

The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is
an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this
date. I only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next
to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the
Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party
propaganda–that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the
war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and
by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful
whether more than that will ever be established.

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in
1936', at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both
thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of
the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event
is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the
first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation
to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an
ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no
fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been
killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards
and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as
the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in
fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of
what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines'. Yet
in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It
concerned secondary issues–namely, the struggle for power
between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the
efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain.
But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government
presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were
what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers,
how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could
they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was
pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been
otherwise.

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to
represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a
Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in
Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC
HERALD or the DAILY MAIL–but these were child's play compared
with the Continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely
exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge
pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over
the world built up, let me take just one point–the presence
in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in
this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million.
Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a
handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most,
but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought
in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the
Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government
Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the
fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits
of their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point,
but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on
this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives
me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading
out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at
any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history
of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his
nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen
point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical
fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But
suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic
government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then,
how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records
will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records
kept on the Government side are recoverable–even so, how is a
true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out
already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the
anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of
the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every
minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written,
and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will
have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is
lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most
part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is
the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully
written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they
unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the
truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less
discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body
of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you
look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount
of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a
German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on
fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were,
neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other.
It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication
that human beings are all one species of animal, that
totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies
that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no
such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish
Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique,
controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of
such and such an event, 'It never happened'–well, it never
happened. If he says that two and two are five–well, two and
two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than
bombs–and after our experiences of the last few years that is
not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with
visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the
totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a
nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting
phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and
yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality
only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth,
the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you
consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth
remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let
Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms,
conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist.
We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because
our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental
belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most
fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a
literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter,
we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in
the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But
why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what
instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing
unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could
have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe?
Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour
camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews
and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or
swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattel slavery.
The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by
individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways–the
breaking-up of families, for instance–the conditions are
probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations.
There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp
its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a
régime founded on slavery MUST collapse. But it is worth
comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that
of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted
for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that
those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization
rested generation after generation have left behind them no record
whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek
and Roman history, how many slaves' names are known to you? I can
think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is
Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a
glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX
FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair
and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have
been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely
know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone
down into utter silence.

5.

The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish
working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the
long run–it is important to remember that it is only in the
long run–the working class remains the most reliable enemy of
Fascism, simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a
decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or
categories, it can't be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long
struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual
workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel
that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after
country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by
open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them
in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing;
and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the
fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even
lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious
international proletariat after the events of the past ten years?
To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in
Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less
interesting and less important than yesterday's football match. Yet
this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on
struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One
feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing
defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the
left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the
people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable
proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes.
They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreover they can be bribed–for it is evident that the Nazis
think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class
it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick
that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of
Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle
again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always
discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win
over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to
raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and
probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like
the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows
enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do
this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers
struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and
more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this
aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting
consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and
believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant
feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months
of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic
was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they
were in the right, because they were fighting for something which
the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true
perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility
of War–and in this particular case of the intrigues, the
persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings–there is
always the temptation to say: 'One side is as bad as the other. I
am neutral'. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there
is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who
wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other
side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish
Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys,
Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the
land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the
cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened.
It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed
their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its
surface.

6.

The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris,
Rome, Berlin–at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of
1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government
could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the
international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the
others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the
world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The
much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main
cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised,
ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they
would have been the same if complete political agreement had
existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish
factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had
never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional
pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of
foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were
very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that
the war could have been won if the revolution had not been
sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish
churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made
the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the
stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political
strategy could offset that.

The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of
the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the
Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The
motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936
it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the
Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds'
worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be
severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a
clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was
coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would
come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British
ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and
the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious
answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final
showdown they chose to Stand up to Germany. It is still very
uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may
have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are
wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of
our time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to
the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely
inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in
order to defend Democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they
intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the
lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order
to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their
power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private
property and hand power to the middle class as against the working
class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply
in order to PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed
Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one
assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I
believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is
claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any
rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that the Nazis knew what
they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at
a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That
side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms
to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the
Russians didn't give arms to those who should have been their
friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having' gained what no
republic missed'.

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries
undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when
they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it
was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point
of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender
without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle
against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless
armies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was
undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that
dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it
merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to get
their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

7.

I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming
into my mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather
sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a
refrain that ended–

UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST' AL FIN!

Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen
months of the war the Republican armies must have been fighting
almost without cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when
I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce,
tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.

The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand
in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this
man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish war [Homage to
Catalonia], and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I
remember–oh, how vividly!–his shabby uniform and
fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war
seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no
doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and
journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of
people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their
birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man's
probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him
in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist,
and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that
sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the
G.P.U. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man's
face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a
sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He
symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried
by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves
of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several
millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported
Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think
of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler,
Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst,
Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen,
Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu,
Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into
the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all
people with something to lose, or people who long for a
hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and
equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about
'godless' Russia and the 'materialism' of the working class lies
the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to
them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk
about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by
a 'change of heart'. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of
California, are great on the' change of heart', much more
reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic
system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the common people's
'love of pleasure'. One sees this in its right perspective if one
stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant's or
working-man's life would contain compared with Pétain's own.
The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary
men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his
'materialism'! All that the working man demands is what these
others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human
life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the
haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children
will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably
often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working hours to
leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of
those who preach against 'materialism' would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained
if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise
the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would
not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I
don't claim, and I don't know who does, that that wouldn't solve
anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour
have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be
tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief
in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the
average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in
fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in
their 'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly
comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of
time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring
becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations are likely to
make one falter–the siren voices of a Pétain or of a
Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to
degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its
democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development
of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics–all
this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually
awakening common people against the lords of property and their
hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall
people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent,
fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't
they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he
not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the
common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be
sooner and not later–some time within the next hundred years,
say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was
the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps
of other wars yet to come.

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn
his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly
two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these
verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman's!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold–Oh! who ever would have
thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)

It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive
in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of
Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one
can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that
has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works.
Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for
fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened
person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of
those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some
sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this
fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that
Kipling is a 'Fascist', he falls into the opposite error of
defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending
that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even
forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for
instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a
'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he
is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve
what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in
Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct–on
the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and
above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.
Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that,
and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the
refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the
first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically,
is the fact that he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being
one than the most humane or the most 'progressive' person is able
to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which
quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up
their context or discover their meaning is the line from
'Recessional', 'Lesser breeds without the Law'. This line is always
good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter
of course that the 'lesser breeds' are 'natives', and a mental
picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a
coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact
opposite of this. The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost
certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers,
who are 'without the Law' in the sense of being lawless, not in the
sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of
as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics,
British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am
quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law–Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word–Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Much of Kipling's phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no
doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm
CXXVII: 'Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that
build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in
vain.' It is not a text that makes much impression on the
post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction
greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to
overcome force except by greater force. There is no 'Law', there is
only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that
it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who
pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or
power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught
up with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is
pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and
that the gods punish HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the
bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their
psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about
Kipling's jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the
nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster
outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely
to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered
him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any
event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British
Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems,
his solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, gives you the atmosphere
of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British
Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in
1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out
of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no
doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity
that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to
plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a
lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough
to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized,
the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the
map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening,
because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces
underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not
seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial
administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.
Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You
turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you
establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a
court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives
which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it.
It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan
jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes
those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern
totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century
English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have
their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from
one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after
all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who
despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without
realizing that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he
does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never
possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class
Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and
vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized
countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business
to fight against something which they do not really wish to
destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they
struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are
incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of
us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to
be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our
'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A
humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of
this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling
phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of
the English in fewer words than in the phrase, 'making mock of
uniforms that guard you while you sleep'. It is true that Kipling
does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between
the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted
red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of
the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane
his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees
clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men,
inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the
administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not
so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely
while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant
mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that
may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to
the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name
the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did
things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed
the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia
and compare the railway system of India with that of the
surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing,
could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if
the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M.
Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling's is the only
literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India,
and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be
able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental
messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I
know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians
who were Kipling's contemporaries did not like or approve of him.
They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on
the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a
highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with 'the wrong' people,
and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of
having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is
traceable to his having been born in India and having left school
early. With a slightly different background he might have been a
good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how
true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity
agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was
a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never
courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against
him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This
narrows the issue by assuming that 'unpopular' means unpopular with
the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling's 'message' was
one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never
accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were
anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously
patriotic. Kipling's official admirers are and were the 'service'
middle class, the people who read BLACKWOOD'S. In the stupid early
years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered
someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set
Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such
as 'If', were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful
whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than
they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not
possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the
inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter
patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is
attacking, but not always. That phrase about 'the flannelled fools
at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal' sticks like an
arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as
well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the
Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their
subject-matter goes. 'Stellenbosch', which must have been written
about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was
saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

Kipling's romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not
have mattered if he could have held them without having the
class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one examines
his best and most representative work, his soldier poems,
especially BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, one notices that what more than
anything else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage.
Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer,
and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though
lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak
in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the
aitches and final "g's" carefully omitted. Very often the result is
as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And
this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve
Kipling's poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by
simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into
standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which
often have a truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is
about a funeral and the other about a wedding):

Cheer for the Sergeant's wedding–Give them one cheer more!
Grey gun-horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore!

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have
known better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of
the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought
to have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-man's
accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the
same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a
distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one
of his best lines is spoiled–for 'follow me 'ome' is much
uglier than 'follow me home'. But even where it makes no difference
musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is
irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the
printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary
alterations when they quote him.

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now,
reading BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS and feeling that here was a writer who
spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of
reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost
unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as
elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but
that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his
officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is
partly true, or battles could not be fought, but 'What have I done
for thee, England, my England?' is essentially a middle-class
query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with
'What has England done for me?' In so far as Kipling grasps this,
he simply sets it down to 'the intense selfishness of the lower
classes' (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of
'loyal' Indians he carries the 'Salaam, sahib' motif to sometimes
disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more
interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get
a fair deal, than most of the 'liberals' of his day or our own. He
sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and
hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards.
'I came to realize', he says in his posthumous memoirs, 'the bare
horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he
endured'. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so,
but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of
football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry,
Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is
realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is
terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is
about or what is happening except in his own corner of the
battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently
run away:

I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man,
Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see,
Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran,
An' I thought I knew the voice an'–it was me!

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one
of the debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow.

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his
youth were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due
to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least
he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives ARE
dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous
pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the
long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One
must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century
Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only
literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of
stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or
from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army
life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any
middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the
gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on Kipling that Mr. Edmund
Wilson has just published or is just about to publish [Note,
below], I was struck by the number of things that are boringly
familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American.
But from the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge
a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old
pre-machine-gun army–the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or
Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats,
the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the
bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing
sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes,
invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken
camps, the 'native' concubines, the ultimate death in the
workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic
music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's
gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to
gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On
about the same level they will be able to learn something of
British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were
unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better
books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing,
or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's opportunities. That is the kind
of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that
nineteenth-century England should produce a book like WAR AND
PEACE, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as
Sebastopol or THE COSSACKS, not because the talent was necessarily
lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write
such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy
lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for
almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army,
whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a
degree which continental observers find almost incredible.
Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of
civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what
one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable
combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in
which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background
of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary
circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

[Note: Published in a volume of Collected Essays, THE WOUND AND
THE BOW. Author's footnote 1945]

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added
phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take
over and use without remembering their origin do not always come
from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the
Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as 'robots',
thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they
would have killed if they could have laid hands on him. Here are
half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in
leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from
people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they
all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.
The white man's burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived
their context by many years. The phrase 'killing Kruger with your
mouth', for instance, was current till very recently. It is also
possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the
word 'Huns' for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as
the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed
above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which one
utters semi-derisively (as it might be 'For I'm to be Queen o' the
May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May'), but which one is bound
to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt
of the NEW STATESMAN, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times
during the Munich period did the NEW STATESMAN find itself quoting
that phrase about paying the Dane-geld? [Note, below.] The fact is
that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for
packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words ('palm and
pine'–'east of Suez'–'the road to Mandalay'), is
generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does
not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent
people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence
from him. 'White man's burden' instantly conjures up a real
problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to 'black
man's burden'. One may disagree to the middle of one's bones with
the political attitude implied in 'The Islanders', but one cannot
say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts
which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of
his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

[Note: On the first page of his recent book, ADAM AND EVE, Mr.
Middleton Murry quotes the well-known lines:

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is
known as a 'Freudian error.' A civilized person would prefer not to
quote Kipling–i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was
Kipling who had expressed his thought for him. (Author's footnote
1945.)]

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling's metrical work as 'verse' and not
'poetry', but adds that it is 'GREAT verse', and further qualifies
this by saying that a writer can only be described as a 'great
verse-writer' if there is some of his work 'of which we cannot say
whether it is verse or poetry'. Apparently Kipling was a versifier
who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr.
Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that
whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling's work seems to be
called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to
speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to
start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of
Kipling's verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same
sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall
performer recite 'The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu' with the purple
limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable
of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his
worst, and also his most vital, in poems like 'Gunga Din' or 'Danny
Deever', Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for
cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But
even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced
by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one
is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who
cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
'Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!'

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as 'Felix
Randal' or 'When icicles hang by the wall' are poetry. One can,
perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with
the words 'verse' and 'poetry', if one describes him simply as a
good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a
novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is
perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes
on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it,
I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad
poems–I am deliberately choosing diverse ones–are 'The
Bridge of Sighs', 'When all the world is young, lad', 'The Charge
of the Light Brigade', Bret Harte's 'Dickens in Camp', 'The Burial
of Sir John Moore', 'Jenny Kissed Me', 'Keith of Ravelston',
'Casabianca'. All of these reek of sentimentality, and
yet–not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this
kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see
clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized
anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant
fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth
reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, 'good'
poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the
cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps
that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry
can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it
disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this
in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery
rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that
soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the
bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the
very word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort
of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word
'God'. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably
go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative
audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of
that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare's
sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to
the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been
worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great
effect by quoting Clough's 'Endeavour' in one of his broadcast
speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could
certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced
that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass
them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had
quoted anything much better than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been
and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his
poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond
the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather
editions, poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster
world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth
while to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share
but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a
thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional
overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The
intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the
time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad
poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable
form–for verse is a mnemonic device, among other
things–some emotion which very nearly every human being can
share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world is young, lad'
is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is 'true'
sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking
the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen
to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and
it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or
sententious. One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again!'
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be
true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner
or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest
who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it
were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard
this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling's power as a good bad poet I have already
suggested–his sense of responsibility, which made it possible
for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false
one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party,
Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays.
Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals,
Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with
the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer
this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the
advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling
power is always faced with the question, 'In such and such
circumstances, what would you DO?', whereas the opposition is not
obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it
is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality
of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who
starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be
justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the
copybook headings', as Kipling himself put it, always return.
Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially
but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the
British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into
abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding
advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and
responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he
is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to ÉPATER LES
BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a
world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst
follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the
'enlightened' utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's
epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND
SUPERMAN.

MARK TWAIN–THE LICENSED JESTER (1943)

Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library,
but only with TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, already fairly well
known under the guise of 'children's books' (which they are not).
His best and most characteristic books, ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS
AT HOME, and even LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, are little remembered in
this country, though no doubt in America the patriotism which is
everywhere mixed up with literary judgement keeps them alive.

Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books,
ranging from a namby-pamby 'life' of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so
obscene that it has never been publicly printed, all that is best
in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining
towns of the West. Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a
family just rich enough to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had
had his youth and early manhood in the golden age of America, the
period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and
opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed
were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for
centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the two other books that I
have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and
social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central
theme which could perhaps be put into these words: 'This is how
human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack.' In
writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to
liberty. Primarily he is interested in 'character', in the
fantastic, almost lunatic variations which human nature is capable
of when economic pressure and tradition are both removed from it.
The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he
describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as
different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles
of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and
sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside
pressure. The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and
spoke with many voices, and land was to be had for the taking. If
you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved
further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the
smallest coin in circulation was worth a shilling. The American
pioneers were not supermen, and they were not especially
courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be
terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put
down. They were not even free from class distinctions. The
desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining settlement,
with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses
to his credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat,
described himself firmly as a 'gentleman' and was meticulous about
table manners. But at least it was NOT the case that a man's
destiny was settled from his birth. The 'log cabin to White House'
myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this
that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one reads
Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their
effort was wasted.

However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a
chronicler of the Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he
was famous all over the world as a humorist and comic lecturer. In
New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne and Calcutta vast
audiences rocked with laughter over jokes which have now, almost
without exception, ceased to be funny. (It is worth noticing that
Mark Twain's lectures were only a success with Anglo-Saxon and
German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin races–whose
own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and
politics–never cared for them.) But in addition, Mark Twain
had some pretensions to being a social critic, even a species of
philosopher. He had in him an iconoclastic, even revolutionary vein
which he obviously wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did
follow up. He might have been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet
of democracy more valuable than Whitman, because healthier and more
humorous. Instead he became that dubious thing a 'public figure',
flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty, and his
career reflects the deterioration in American life that set in
after the Civil War.

Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary,
Anatole France. This comparison is not so pointless as it may
sound. Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had
an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism
overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a
swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions. Both were
bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain's case this was
Darwin's doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But
there the resemblance ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously
more learned, more civilized, more alive aesthetically, but he is
also more courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in;
he does not, like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable
mask of the 'public figure' and the licensed jester. He is ready to
risk the anger of the Church and to take the unpopular side in a
controversy–in the Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain,
except perhaps in one short essay 'What is Man?', never attacks
established beliefs in a way that is likely to get him into
trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion, which is
perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are
the same thing.

In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI there is a queer little illustration
of the central weakness of Mark Twain's character. In the earlier
part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been
altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot
as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas
in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for
this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil
War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started
by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern
side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This
kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence
the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that
he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win;
and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to
believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his
career. In ROUGHING IT there is an interesting account of a bandit
named Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed
twenty-eight murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires
this disgusting scoundrel. Slade was successful; therefore he was
admirable. This outlook, no less common today, is summed up in the
significant American expression 'to MAKE GOOD'.

In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was
hard for anyone of Mark Twain's temperament to refuse to be a
success. The old, simple, stump-whittling, tobacco-chewing
democracy which Abraham Lincoln typified was perishing: it was now
the age of cheap immigrant labour and the growth of Big Business.
Mark Twain mildly satirized his contemporaries in The GILDED AGE,
but he also gave himself up to the prevailing fever, and made and
lost vast sums of money. He even for a period of years deserted
writing for business; and he squandered his time on buffooneries,
not merely lecture tours and public banquets, but, for instance,
the writing of a book like A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S
COURT, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and most
vulgar in American life. The man who might have been a kind of
rustic Voltaire became the world's leading after-dinner speaker,
charming alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen
feel themselves public benefactors.

It is usual to blame Mark Twain's wife for his failure to write
the books he ought to have written, and it is evident that she did
tyrannize over him pretty thoroughly. Each morning, Mark Twain
would show her what he had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens
(Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens) would go over it with
the blue pencil, cutting out everything that she thought
unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic blue-penciller even by
nineteenth-century standards. There is an account in W.D. Howells's
book MY MARK TWAIN of the fuss that occurred over a terrible
expletive that had crept into HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Mark Twain appealed
to Howells, who admitted that it was 'just what Huck would have
said', but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word could not
possibly be printed. The word was 'hell'. Nevertheless, no writer
is really the intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could
not have stopped Mark Twain writing any book he really wanted to
write. She may have made his surrender to society easier, but the
surrender happened because of that flaw in his own nature, his
inability to despise success.

Several of Mark Twain's books are bound to survive, because they
contain invaluable social history. His life covered the great
period of American expansion. When he was a child it was a normal
day's outing to go with a picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an
Abolitionist, and when he died the aeroplane was ceasing to be a
novelty. This period in America produced relatively little
literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a Mississippi
paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much
dimmer than it is. But most people who have studied his work have
come away with a feeling that he might have done something more. He
gives all the while a strange impression of being about to say
something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and
the rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and
much more coherent book. Significantly, he starts his autobiography
by remarking that a man's inner life is indescribable. We do not
know what he would have said–it is just possible that the
unprocurable pamphlet, 1601, would supply a clue but we may guess
that it would have wrecked his reputation and reduced his income to
reasonable proportions.

POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in
broadcasting literary programmes to India, and among other things
we broadcast a good deal of verse by contemporary and
near-contemporary English writers–for example, Eliot, Herbert
Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort,
Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D.H. Lawrence. Whenever it was
possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote them. Just
why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-flanking
movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to
explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were
broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some
extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were
aimed at the Indian university students, a small and hostile
audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as
British propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope
for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave
us an excuse to be more "highbrow" than is generally possible on
the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language
but don't share your cultural background, a certain amount of
comment and explanation is unavoidable, and the formula we usually
followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary
magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their
office, discussing what to put into the next number. Somebody
suggested one poem, someone else suggested another, there was a
short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different
voice, preferably the author's own. This poem naturally called up
another, and so the programme continued, usually with at least half
a minute of discussion between any two items. For a half-hour
programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A programme of
this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given
a certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single
central theme. For example, one number of our imaginary magazine
was devoted to the subject of war. It included two poems by Edmund
Blunden, Auden's "September 1941 ", extracts from a long poem by
G.S. Fraser ("A Letter to Anne Ridler"), Byron's "Isles of Greece"
and an extract from T.E. Lawrence's REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These
half-dozen items, with the arguments that preceded and followed
them, covered reasonably well the possible attitudes towards war.
The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to
broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather
patronising, but its advantage is that the element of mere
instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if one
is going to broadcast serious and sometimes "difficult" verse,
becomes a lot less forbidding when it appears as an informal
discussion. The various speakers can ostensibly say to one another
what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by such an
approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what
poetry lacks from the average man's point of view. But of course
there are other methods. One which we frequently used was to set a
poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes' time such and
such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a
minute, then fades out into the poem, which follows without any
title or announcement, then the music is faded again and plays up
for another minute or two–the whole thing taking perhaps five
minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless
to say, the real purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from
the rest of the programme. By this method you can have, say, a
Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin without,
at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great
value in themselves, but I have mentioned them because of the ideas
they aroused in myself and some others about the possibilities of
the radio as a means of popularising poetry. I was early struck by
the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it
does not merely produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but
also on the poet himself. One must remember that extremely little
in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in England, and
that many people who write verse have never even considered the
idea of reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone,
especially if this happens at all regularly, the poet is brought
into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise attainable in
our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modern
times–the last two hundred years, say–poetry has come
to have less and less connection either with music or with the
spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no
more expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even
to declaim than it is expected that an architect will know how to
plaster a ceiling. Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have almost ceased
to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the
common man has come to be taken for granted in any country where
everyone can read. And where such a breach exists it is always
inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry as primarily
something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority,
encourages obscurity and "cleverness". How many people do not feel
quasi-instinctively that there must be something wrong with any
poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single glance? It seems
unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again
becomes normal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how
this can be brought about except by using the radio as a medium.
But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select the
right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment,
ought here to be noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an
audience of ONE. Millions may be listening, but each is listening
alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to
have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More
than this, it is reasonable to assume that your audience is
sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can
promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably
sympathetic, the audience HAS NO POWER OVER YOU. It is just here
that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the
platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost
impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always
obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what
they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak
for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person
present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo
known as "personality". If you don't do so, the result is always an
atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a "poetry
reading", is what it is because there will always be some among the
audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can't
remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at
bottom the same difficulty–the fact that a theatre audience
is not a selected one–that makes it impossible to get a
decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these
conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing
people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets
who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a
virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in
front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does
not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible
the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse
aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange
between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as
SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the
reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It
already exists at the poet's end of the aether-waves, whatever may
be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be
disregarded. It will be seen that I have been speaking as though
the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost indecent, as
though popularising poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre,
like getting a dose of medicine down a child's throat or
establishing tolerance for a persecuted sect. But unfortunately
that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that
in our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the
arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to
discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he
said that in the English-speaking countries the word "poetry" would
disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed
out, a breach of this kind tends to widen simply because of its
existence, the common man becoming more and more anti-poetry, the
poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the divorce
between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of
nature, although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a
comparatively small area of the earth. We live in an age in which
the average human being in the highly civilised countries is
aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs
is generally looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS act,
and on the other hand is expected to right itself of its own accord
as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With slight variations
the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell
you this, and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness
amid which we live has spiritual and economic causes and is not to
be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at some point or
other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible
within our present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is
not a necessary part of the general redemption of society. It is
worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would not be
possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the
most hated of the arts and win for it at least the same degree of
toleration as exists for music. But one has to start by asking, in
what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as
it could be. But on second thoughts, this has to be qualified in a
rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an appreciable
amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally
known and quoted and forms part of the background of everyone's
mind. There is also a handful of ancient songs and ballads which
have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the popularity,
or at least the toleration, of "good bad" poetry, generally of a
patriotic or sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if
it were not that "good bad" poetry has all the characteristics
which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It is
in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual
language–all this to a very marked degree, for it is almost
axiomatic that bad poetry is more "poetical" than good poetry. Yet
if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just
before writing this I have been listening to a couple of BBC
comedians doing their usual turn before the 9 o'clock news. In the
last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces that
he "wants to be serious for a moment" and proceeds to recite a
piece of patriotic balderdash entitled "A Fine Old English
Gentleman", in praise of His Majesty the King. Now, what is the
reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort
of rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there
would be a sufficient volume of indignant letters to stop the BBC
doing this kind of thing. One must conclude that though the big
public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE.
After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes,
neither songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. Poetry is
disliked because it is associated with untelligibility,
intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of
Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name creates in advance the same sort of
bad impression as the word "God", or a parson's dog-collar. To a
certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down
an acquired inhibition. It is a question of getting people to
listen instead of uttering a mechanical raspberry. If true poetry
could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it
seem NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to
presumably seemed normal, then part of the prejudice against it
might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised
again without some deliberate effort at the education of public
taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge. T.S. Eliot
once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be
brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the
medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose
vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely
explored. "Sweeney Agonistes" was perhaps written with some such
idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall
turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested the radio
as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical
advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The
reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is
that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the
dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff
that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and
conclude that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless
exists. Indeed the very word "wireless" calls up a picture either
of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that
three of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air
sounds like the Muses in striped trousers. Nevertheless one ought
not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is
actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is
something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole
apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but because all the
broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the
control of governments or great monopoly companies which are
actively interested in maintaining the STATUS QUO and therefore in
preventing the common man from becoming too intelligent. Something
of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio,
made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is
fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is
similar. More and more the channels of production are under the
control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy the artist or at
least to castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not
that the totalitarianisation which is now going on, and must
undoubtedly continue to go on, in every country of the world, is
mitigated by another process which it was not easy to foresee even
as short a time as five years ago.

This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all
part are beginning to work creakily because of their mere size and
their constant growth. The tendency of the modern state is to wipe
out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every
state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and
more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The
modern state needs, for example, pamphlet-writers, poster artists,
illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song
composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention
psychologists, sociologists, bio-chemists, mathematicians and what
not. The British Government started the present war with the more
or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary
intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years of war almost every
writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has
been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC and even those
who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a while in
Public Relations or some other essentially literary job. The
Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because
it found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal, from the
official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into
the hands of "safe" people like A.P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since
not enough of these were available, the existing intelligentsia had
to be utilised, and the tone and even to some extent the content of
official propaganda have been modified accordingly. No one
acquainted with the Government pamphlets, ABCA (The Army Bureau of
Current Affairs.) lectures, documentary films and broadcasts to
occupied countries which have been issued during the past two years
imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they
could help it. Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes,
the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. This is
perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a despicable one. It
means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal
tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete. The
striped-trousered ones will rule, but so long as they are forced to
maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a certain
amount of autonomy. If the Government needs, for example,
documentary films, it must employ people specially interested in
the technique of the film, and it must allow them the necessary
minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong from the
bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to appear.
So also with painting, photography, script-writing, reportage,
lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of which a complex
modern state has need.

The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the
loudspeaker is the enemy of the creative writer, but this may not
necessarily remain true when the volume and scope of broadcasting
increase. As things are, although the BBC does keep up a feeble
show of interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to
capture five minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than
twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned
music, stale jokes, faked "discussions" or what-have-you. But that
state of affairs may alter in the way I have indicated, and when
that time comes serious experiment in the broadcasting of verse,
with complete disregard for the various hostile influences which
prevent any such thing at present, would become possible. I don't
claim it as certain that such an experiment would have very great
results. The radio was bureaucratised so early in its career that
the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been
thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the
instrument by which poetry could be brought back to the common
people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain by being
more of a spoken and less of a written thing. But I do urge that
these possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature
might turn their minds more often to this much-despised medium,
whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by the voices of
Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.

W B YEATS (1943)

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is
to trace the connection between "tendency" and literary style. The
subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in
sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such
connection there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist
would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard
Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not easy to say. In the case of
Yeats, there must be some kind of connection between his wayward,
even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of
life. Mr Menon is chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy
underlying Yeats's work, but the quotations which are scattered all
through his interesting book serve to remind one how artificial
Yeats's manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is
accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity
because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six
consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or
an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:

Grant me an old man's Frenzy,
My self must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.

The unnecessary "that" imports a feeling of affectation, and the
same tendency is present in all but Yeats's best passages. One is
seldom long away from a suspicion of "quaintness", something that
links up not only with the 'nineties, the Ivory Tower and the "calf
covers of pissed-on green", but also with Rackham's drawings,
Liberty art-fabrics and the PETER PAN never-never land, of which,
after all, "The Happy Townland" is merely a more appetising
example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats gets
away with it, and if his straining after effect is often
irritating, it can also produce phrases ("the chill, footless
years", "the mackerel-crowded seas") which suddenly overwhelm one
like a girl's face seen across a room. He is an exception to the
rule that poets do not use poetical language:

How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?

Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like
"loveliness" and after all it does not seriously spoil this
wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort of
raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and
polemical poems. For instance (I am quoting from memory) the
epigram against the critics who damned THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN
WORLD:

Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by;
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy
ready made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but
even in this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words.
It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.

Mr Menon's book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats, but
he is above all interested in Yeats's philosophical "system", which
in his opinion supplies the subject-matter of more of Yeats's poems
than is generally recognised. This system is set forth
fragmentarily in various places, and at full length in A VISION, a
privately printed book which I have never read but which Mr Menon
quotes from extensively. Yeats gave conflicting accounts of its
origin, and Mr Menon hints pretty broadly that the "documents" on
which it was ostensibly founded were imaginary. Yeats's
philosophical system, says Mr Menon, "was at the back of his
intellectual life almost from the beginning. His poetry is full of
it. Without it his later poetry becomes almost completely
unintelligible." As soon as we begin to read about the so-called
system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels,
gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits,
astrology and what not. Yeats hedges as to the literalness with
which he believed in all this, but he certainly dabbled in
spiritualism and astrology, and in earlier life had made
experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under explanations,
very difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon, the
central idea of his philosophical system seems to be our old
friend, the cyclical universe, in which everything happens over and
over again. One has not, perhaps, the right to laugh at Yeats for
his mystical beliefs–for I believe it could be shown that
SOME degree of belief in magic is almost universal–but
neither ought one to write such things off as mere unimportant
eccentricities. It is Mr Menon's perception of this that gives his
book its deepest interest. "In the first flush of admiration and
enthusiasm," he says, "most people dismissed the fantastical
philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious
intellect. One did not quite realise where he was heading. And
those who did, like Pound and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand
that he finally took. The first reaction to this did not come, as
one might have expected, from the politically-minded young English
poets. They were puzzled because a less rigid or artificial system
than that of A VISION might not have produced the great poetry of
Yeats's last days." It might not, and yet Yeats's philosophy has
some very sinister implications, as Mr Menon points out.

Translated into political terms, Yeats's tendency is Fascist.
Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard
of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the
aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern
world, science, machinery, the concept of progress–above all,
of the idea of human equality. Much of the imagery of his work is
feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether free from
ordinary snobbishness. Later these tendencies took clearer shape
and led him to "the exultant acceptance of authoritarianism as the
only solution. Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily evil
because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become
perfectly acquiescent to tyranny...Everything must come from the
top. Nothing can come from the masses." Not much interested in
politics, and no doubt disgusted by his brief incursions into
public life, Yeats nevertheless makes political pronouncements. He
is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early
as 1920 he foretells in a justly famous passage ("The Second
Coming") the kind of world that we have actually moved into. But he
appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be "hierarchical,
masculine, harsh, surgical", and is influenced both by Ezra Pound
and by various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new
civilisation which he hopes and believes will arrive: "an
aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form, every detail
of life hierarchical, every great man's door crowded at dawn by
petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men's hands, all
dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God
dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the
family, an inequality made law." The innocence of this statement is
as interesting as its snobbishness. To begin with, in a single
phrase, "great wealth in a few men's hands", Yeats lays bare the
central reality of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is
designed to cover up. The merely political Fascist claims always to
be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that
Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason. But
at the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian
civilisation, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he
means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van
Dyck faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed
bureaucrats and murdering gangsters. Others who have made the same
mistake have afterwards changed their views and one ought not to
assume that Yeats, if he had lived longer, would necessarily have
followed his friend Pound, even in sympathy. But the tendency of
the passage I have quoted above is obvious, and its complete
throwing overboard of whatever good the past two thousand years
have achieved is a disquieting symptom.

How do Yeat's political ideas link up with his leaning towards
occultism? It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy
and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together. Mr
Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to
make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilisation moves
in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept
of human equality. If it is true that "all this", or something like
it, "has happened before", then science and the modern world are
debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It
does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above
themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of
tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the
universe is moving round on a wheel, the future must be
foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail. It is merely a question
of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astronomers
discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult
not to believe in astrology or some similar system. A year before
the war, examining a copy of GRINGOIRE, the French Fascist weekly,
much read by army officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight
advertisements of clairvoyants. Secondly, the very concept of
occultism carries with it the idea that knowledge must be a secret
thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the same idea is
integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal
suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of
women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults.
There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound
hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.

No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different
times many different opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr Menon
repeats for him Eliot's claim that he had the longest period of
development of any poet who has ever lived. But there is one thing
that seems constant, at least in all of his work that I can
remember, and that is his hatred of modern western civilisation and
desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps to the Middle Ages.
Like all such thinkers, he tends to write in praise of ignorance.
The Fool in his remarkable play, THE HOUR-GLASS, is a Chestertonian
figure, "God's fool", the "natural born innocent", who is always
wiser than the wise man. The philosopher in the play dies on the
knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been wasted (I am
quoting from memory again):

The stream of the world has changed its course,
And with the stream my thoughts have run
Into some cloudly, thunderous spring
That is its mountain-source;
Ay, to a frenzy of the mind,
That all that we have done's undone
Our speculation but as the wind.

Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and
reactionary; for if it is really true that a village idiot, as
such, is wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better if the
alphabet had never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past
is partly sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor
do not praise poverty. Before you can despise the machine, the
machine must set you free from brute labour. But that is not to say
that Yeats's yearning for a more primitive and more hierarchical
age was not sincere. How much of all this is traceable to mere
snobbishness, product of Yeats's own position as an impoverished
offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question. And the
connection between his obscurantist opinions and his tendency
towards "quaintness" of language remains to be worked out; Mr Menon
hardly touches upon it.

This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr
Menon go ahead and write another book on Yeats, starting where this
one leaves off. "If the greatest poet of our times is exultantly
ringing in an era of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing
symptom," he says on the last page, and leaves it at that. It is a
disturbing symptom, because it is not an isolated one. By and large
the best writers of our time have been reactionary in tendency, and
though Fascism does not offer any real return to the past, those
who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner than its probable
alternatives. But there are other lines of approach, as we have
seen during the past two or three years. The relationship between
Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs investigating,
and Yeats might well be the starting-point. He is best studied by
someone like Mr Menon, who can approach a poet primarily as a poet,
but who also knows that a writer's political and religious beliefs
are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will
leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.

ARTHUR KOESTLER (1944)

One striking fact about English literature during the present
century is the extent to which it has been dominated by
foreigners–for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce,
Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter
of national prestige and examine our achievement in the various
branches of literature, you would find that England made a fairly
good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special
class of literature that has arisen out of the European political
struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels,
autobiographies, books of "reportage", sociological treatises and
plain pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them having a
common origin and to a great extent the same emotional
atmosphere.

Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers
are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler
himself. Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but they
are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but UNOFFICIAL history, the kind that is ignored in the
text-books and lied about in the newspapers. Also they are all
alike in being continental Europeans. It may be an exaggeration,
but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book
dealing with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still
seems worth reading six months after publication, it is a book
translated from some foreign language. English writers, over the
past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political
literature, but they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic
value, and very little of historical value either. The Left Book
Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of
its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi
Germany, Soviet Russia, Spain, Abyssinia, Austria,
Czechoslovakia–all that these and kindred subjects have
produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest
pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up
again, half digested, and a very few reliable guide books and
text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,
FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English
writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the
inside. In Europe, during the past decade and more, things have
been happening to middle-class people which in England do not even
happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I
mentioned above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged
to break the law in order to engage in politics at all; some of
them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles, many have been
in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with
false names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say,
Professor Laski indulging in activities of that kind. England is
lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-camp
literature. The special world created by secret-police forces,
censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course,
known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very
little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in
England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet
Union. There is the attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is
the attitude of uncritical admiration, but very little in between.
Opinion on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided,
but divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were
guilty. Few people were able to see that, whether justified or not,
the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English disapproval of
the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing, turned on and off
like a tap according to political expediency. To understand such
things one has to be able to imagine oneself as the victim, and for
an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be as unlikely an
accident as for a slave-trader to write UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

Koestler's published work really centres about the Moscow
trials. His main theme is the decadence of revolutions owing to the
corrupting effects of power, but the special nature of the Stalin
dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far removed
from pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has
written in all. He is a Hungarian whose earlier books were written
in German, and five books have been published in England: SPANISH
TESTAMENT, THE GLADIATORS, DARKNESS AT NOON, SCUM. OF THE EARTH,
and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE. The subject-matter of all of them is
similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages
from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five books, the action of
three takes place entirely or almost entirely in prison.

In the opening months of the Spanish civil war Koestler was the
NEWS CHRONICLE'S correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was
taken prisoner when the Fascists captured Malaga. He was nearly
shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned in a fortress,
listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after
batch of Republicans was executed, and being most of the time in
acute danger of execution himself. This was not a chance adventure
which "might have happened to anybody", but was in accordance with
Koestler's life-style. A politically indifferent person would not
have been in Spain at that date, a more cautious observer would
have got out of Malaga before the Fascists arrived, and a British
or American newspaper man would have been treated with more
consideration. The book that Koestler wrote about this, SPANISH
TESTAMENT, has remarkable passages, but apart from the scrappiness
that is usual in a book of reportage, it is definitely false in
places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the
nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the
rest of the book is too much coloured by the Popular Front
orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even look as though they
had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that
time Koestler still was, or recently had been, a member of the
Communist Party, and the complex politics of the civil war made it
impossible for any Communist to write honestly about the internal
struggle on the Government side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers
from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist
without being anti-totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew
this, but did not feel free to say so. He came much nearer to
saying it–indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to
do so–in his next book, THE GLADIATORS, which was published
about a year before the war and for some reason attracted very
little attention.

THE GLADIATORS is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is
about Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves'
rebellion in Italy round about 65 BC, and any book on such a
subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with
SALAMMBÔ. In our own age it would not be possible to write a
book like SALAMMBÔ even if one had the talent. The great
thing about Salammbô, even more important than its physical
detail, is its utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself
into the stony cruelty of antiquity, because in the mid-nineteenth
century one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel in the
past. Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be
escaped from, and if one bothers with history it is in order to
find modern meanings there. Koestler makes Spartacus into an
allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian
dictator. Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of
the imagination, to make his mercenaries truly pre-Christian,
Spartacus is a modern man dressed up. But this might not matter if
Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolutions
always go wrong–that is the main theme. It is on the question
of WHY they go wrong that he falters, and his uncertainty enters
into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic and
unreal.

For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly
successful. Their numbers swell to a hundred thousand, they overrun
great areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive expedition
after another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that
time were the masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to
work to build a city of their own, to be named the City of the Sun.
In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and above all,
they are to be happy: no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no
floggings, no executions. It is the dream of a just society which
seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and in all ages,
whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless
society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once
existed in the past and from which we have degenerated. Needless to
say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner have they formed
themselves into a community than their way of life turns out to be
as unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross,
symbol of slavery, has to be revived for the punishment of
malefactors. The turning-point comes when Spartacus finds himself
obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful
followers. After that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves
split up and are defeated in detail, the last fifteen thousand of
them being captured and crucified in one batch.

The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of
Spartacus himself are never made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius,
who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler, sets forth the
familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless
you are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you
pervert your original aims. Spartacus, however, is not represented
as power hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a visionary. He is
driven onwards by some obscure force which he does not understand,
and he is frequently in two minds as to whether it would not be
better to throw up the whole adventure and flee to Alexandria while
the going is good. The slaves' republic is in any case wrecked
rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The slaves are
discontented with their liberty because they still have to work,
and the final break-up happens because the more turbulent and less
civilised slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans, continue to behave
like bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a
true account of events–naturally we know very little about
the slave rebellions of antiquity–but by allowing the Sun
City to be destroyed because Crixus the Gaul cannot be prevented
from looting and raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and
history. If Spartacus is the prototype of the modern
revolutionary–and obviously he is intended as that–he
should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining
power with righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure,
acted upon rather than acting, and at times not convincing. The
story partly fails because the central problem of revolution has
been avoided or, at least, has not been solved.

It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book,
Koestler's masterpiece, DARKNESS AT NOON. Here, however, the story
is not spoiled, because it deals with individuals and its interest
is psychological. It is an episode picked out from a background
that does not have to be questioned. DARKNESS AT NOON describes the
imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first
denies and ultimately confesses to crimes which he is well aware he
has not committed. The grown-upness, the lack of surprise or
denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show
the advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being
a European. The book reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an
English or American writer could at most have made it into a
polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat
it on the aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has
a political implication, not important in this case but likely to
be damaging in later books.

Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did
Rubashov confess? He is not guilty–that is, not guilty of
anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin
régime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed
to have engaged are all imaginary. He has not even been tortured,
or not very severely. He is worn down by solitude, toothache, lack
of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous
questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to
overcome a hardened revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done
worse to him without breaking his spirit. The confessions obtained
in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:

1. That the accused were guilty.

2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats
to relatives and friends.

3. That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the
habit of loyalty to the Party.

For Koestler's purpose in DARKNESS AT NOON, 1 is ruled out, and
though this is not the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must
add that what little verifiable evidence there is suggests that the
trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the
accused were not guilty–at any rate, not guilty of the
particular things they confessed to–then 2 is the
common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is
also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet
CAUCHEMAR EN URSS. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot
find in his own mind any reason for not doing so. Justice and
objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning for him. For
decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the
Party now demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes.
In the end, though he had to be bullied and weakened first, he is
somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels superior to the
poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to
Rubashov by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked
when he learns that Rubashov intends to capitulate. As he sees it
from his "bourgeois" angle, everyone ought to stick to his guns,
even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think
right. "Honour is to be useful without fuss," Rubashov taps back;
and he reflects with a certain satisfaction that he is tapping with
his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is tapping
with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is "looking out upon black
darkness". What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of
good and evil, for the sake of which he can defy the Party and
endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also hollow. He
has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being
perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the
Party in Nazi Germany, he has got rid of disobedient followers by
betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough, if he has any
inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of his boyhood when
he was the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he
is shot from behind, is the leaves of poplar trees on his father's
estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of Bolsheviks that
was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and
literature, and of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply
with Gletkin, the young GPU man who conducts his interrogation, and
who is the typical "good party man", completely without scruples or
curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does
not have the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a
blank sheet when the Party got hold of it. His superiority to the
other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.

One cannot, I think, argue that DARKNESS AT NOON is simply a
story dealing with the adventures of an imaginary individual.
Clearly it is a political book, founded on history and offering an
interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be called
Trotsky, Bukharin Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised
figure among the Old Bolsheviks. If one writes about the Moscow
trials one must answer the question, "Why did the accused confess?"
and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler
answers, in effect, "Because these people had been rotted by the
Revolution which they served", and in doing so he comes near to
claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one assumes
that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by means
of some kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular
set of revolutionary leaders has gone astray. Individuals, and not
the situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler's book,
however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin:
or rather, only better in that his outlook is still partly
pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems to say, is a
corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must
end up as either Rubashov or Gletkin. It is not merely that "power
corrupts": so also do the ways of attaining power. Therefore, all
efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS lead to the cellars
of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble
Stalin if he had happened to survive.

Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and
perhaps is not altogether conscious of it. He is writing about
darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon. Part of the
time he feels that things might have turned out differently. The
notion that so-and-so has "betrayed", that things have only gone
wrong because of individual wickedness, is ever present in
left-wing thought. Later, in ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE, Koestler swings
over much further towards the anti-revolutionary position, but in
between these two books there is another, SCUM OF THE EARTH, which
is straight autobiography and has only an indirect bearing upon the
problems raised by DARKNESS AT NOON. True to his life-style,
Koestler was caught in France by the outbreak of war and, as a
foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly arrested and
interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months
of war mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of
France, escaped and travelled by devious routes to England, where
he was once again thrown into prison as an enemy alien. This time
he was soon released, however. The book is a valuable piece of
reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing
that happened to be produced at the time of the
débâcle, it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois
democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France newly
liberated and the witch-hunt after collaborators in full swing, we
are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers on the spot
considered that about forty per cent of the French population was
either actively pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war
books are never acceptable to non-combatants, and Koestler's book
did not have a very good reception. Nobody came well out of
it–neither the bourgeois politicians, whose idea of
conducting an anti-Fascist war was to jail every left-winger they
could lay their hands on, nor the French Communists, who were
effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the French war
effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to follow
mountebanks like Doriot as responsible leaders. Koestler records
some fantastic conversations with fellow victims in the
concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class
Socialists and Communists, he had never made contact with real
proletarians, only with the educated minority. He draws the
pessimistic conclusion: "Without education of the masses, no social
progress; without social progress, no education of the masses". In
SCUM OF THE EARTH Koestler ceases to idealise the common people. He
has abandoned Stalinism, but he is not a Trotskyist either. This is
the book's real link with ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE, in which what is
normally called a revolutionary outlook is dropped, perhaps for
good.

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE is not a satisfactory book. The pretence
that it is a novel is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting
to show that revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic
impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book begins and ends
with the same action–a leap into a foreign country. A young
ex-Communist who has made his escape from Hungary jumps ashore in
Portugal, where he hopes to enter the service of Britain, at that
time the only power fighting against Germany. His enthusiasm is
somewhat cooled by the fact that the British Consulate is
uninterested in him and almost ignores him for a period of several
months, during which his money runs out and other astuter refugees
escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in the
form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French
girl, and–after a nervous breakdown–the Devil in the
form of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst drags out of him the
fact that his revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real
belief in historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex
arising from an attempt in early childhood to blind his baby
brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of serving the
Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he is on
the point of leaving for America when his irrational impulses seize
hold of him again. In practice he cannot abandon the struggle. When
the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the dark
landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a
secret agent of Britain.

As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this
is insufficient. Of course it is true in many cases, and it may be
true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the result of
personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on
the whole, those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy
people are no more attracted by violence and illegality than they
are by war. The young Nazi in ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE makes the
penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the
left-wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after all,
this does not invalidate the Socialist case. Actions have results,
irrespective of their motives. Marx's ultimate motives may well
have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his
conclusions were false. In making the hero of ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE
take his final decision from a mere instinct not to shirk action
and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a sudden loss of
intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him, he would be
able to see that certain things have to be done, whether our
reasons for doing them are "good" or "bad". History has to move in
a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by
neurotics. In ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE Peter's idols are overthrown
one after the other. The Russian Revolution has degenerated,
Britain, symbolised by the aged consul with gouty fingers, is no
better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth.
But the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero
"support" the war) ought to be that getting rid of Hitler is still
a worth-while objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in which
motives are almost irrelevant.

To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of
the future. At present Koestler seems to have none, or rather to
have two which cancel out. As an ultimate objective he believes in
the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to
establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists,
Anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of years. But his
intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise is receding into
the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is
bloodshed, tyranny and privation. Recently he described himself as
a "short-term pessimist". Every kind of horror is blowing up over
the horizon, but somehow it will all come right in the end. This
outlook is probably gaining ground among thinking people: it
results from the very great difficulty, once one has abandoned
orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on earth as inherently
miserable, and on the other hand, from the realisation that to make
life liveable is a much bigger problem than it recently seemed.
Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism
whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred,
cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster
ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness.
It is quite possible that man's major problems will NEVER be
solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look
at the world of today and say to himself, "It will always be like
this: even in a million years it cannot get appreciably better?" So
you get the quasi-mystical belief that for the present there is no
remedy, all political action is useless, but that somewhere in
space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish
thing it now is.

The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who
regards this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few
thinking people now believe in life after death, and the number of
those who do is probably diminishing. The Christian churches would
probably not survive on their own merits if their economic basis
were destroyed.

The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while
accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not
assume that the object of life is happiness. It is most unlikely,
however, that Koestler would accept this. There is a well-marked
hedonistic strain in his writings, and his failure to find a
political position after breaking with Stalinism is a result of
this.

The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler's fife,
started out with high hopes. We forget these things now, but a
quarter of a century ago it was confidently expected that the
Russian Revolution would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has not
happened. Koestler is too acute not to see this, and too sensitive
not to remember the original objective. Moreover, from his European
angle he can see such things as purges and mass deportations for
what they are; he is not, like Shaw or Laski, looking at them
through the wrong end of the telescope. Therefore he draws the
conclusion: This is what revolutions lead to. There is nothing for
it except to be a "short-term pessimist" i.e. to keep out of
politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends
can remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a
hundred years. At the basis of this lies his hedonism, which leads
him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps,
however, whether desirable or not, it isn't possible. Perhaps some
degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the
choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim
of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it
better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same
failure. It is his unwillingness to admit this that has led
Koestler's mind temporarily into a blind alley and that makes
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE seem shallow compared with the earlier
books.

BENEFIT OF CLERGY: SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI (1944)

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something
disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably
lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a
series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book
(Frank Harris's autobiographical writings are an example) can
without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dali's
recently published LIFE comes under this heading. Some of the
incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged
and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent
ORDINARINESS of everyday life has been cut out. Dali is even by his
own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a
strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of
fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible
by the machine age, it has great value.

Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali's life, from his
earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are
imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of
thing that Dali would have LIKED to do.

When he is six years old there is some excitement over the
appearance of Halley's comet:

Suddenly one of my father's office clerks appeared in the
drawing-room doorway and announced that the comet could be seen
from the terrace... While crossing the hall I caught sight of my
little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a
doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible
kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued
running, carried away with a 'delirious joy' induced by this savage
act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down in
to his office, where I remained as a punishment till
dinner-time.

A year earlier than this Dali had 'suddenly, as most of my ideas
occur,' flung another little boy off a suspension bridge. Several
other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including (THIS WAS
WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD) knocking down and trampling on a
girl 'until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.'

When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he
puts into a tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is almost
dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in
his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.

When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with
him. He kisses and caresses her so as to excite her as much as
possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up
for five years (he calls it his 'five-year plan'), enjoying her
humiliation and the sense of power it gives him. He frequently
tells her that at the end of the five years he will desert her, and
when the time comes he does so.

Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of
masturbation, and likes to do this, apparently, in front of a
looking-glass. For ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears,
till the age of thirty or so. When he first meets his future wife,
Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her off a precipice. He is
aware that there is something that she wants him to do to her, and
after their first kiss the confession is made:

I threw back Gala's head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling
with complete hysteria, I commanded:

'Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me
slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most
ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest
shame!'

Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of
pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered:

'I want you to kill me!'

He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely
what he wanted to do already. He contemplates throwing her off the
bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from doing
so.

During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides,
and makes a trip to Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn
towards the aristocracy, frequents smart SALONS, finds himself
wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte de
Noailles, whom he describes as his 'Maecenas.' When the European
War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place
which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if
danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux, and duly flees to
Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to
pick up a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for America.
The story ends in a blaze of respectability. Dali, at thirty-seven,
has become a devoted husband, is cured of his aberrations, or some
of them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic Church. He is
also, one gathers, making a good deal of money.

However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures
of his Surrealist period, with titles like 'The Great Masturbator',
'Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano', etc. There are
reproductions of these all the way through the book. Many of Dali's
drawings are simply representational and have a characteristic to
be noted later. But from his Surrealist paintings and photographs
the two things that stand our are sexual perversity and
necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols–some of them well
known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like
the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by Dali
himself–recur over and over again, and there is a fairly
well-marked excretory motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu
Lugubre, he says, 'the drawers bespattered with excrement were
painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole
little Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he
coprophagic or not?' Dali adds firmly that he is NOT, and that he
regards this aberration as 'repulsive', but it seems to be only at
that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he
recounts the experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he
has to add the detail that she misses her aim and dirties her
shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the vices, and
Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems
to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish
for.

However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He
himself freely admits to this, and claims to have been cured of it.
Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur fairly frequently in
his pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make
countless reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed corpse,
far gone in decomposition. Another shows the dead donkeys
putrefying on top of grand pianos which formed part of the
Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on these
donkeys with great enthusiasm.

I 'made up' the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of
sticky glue which I poured over them. Also I emptied their
eye-sockets and made them larger by hacking them out with scissors.
In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows
of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws
to each mouth, so that it would appear that although the donkeys
were already rotting they were vomiting up a little more their own
death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the
black pianos.

And finally there is the picture–apparently some kind of
faked photograph–of 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab.' Over
the already somewhat bloated face and breast of the apparently dead
girl, huge snails were crawling. In the caption below the picture
Dali notes that these are Burgundy snails–that is, the edible
kind.

Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more
than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an
unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a
book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical
stink off its pages, this one would–a thought that might
please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time
rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung boiled
up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali
is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by
the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard
worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a
fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who
would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two
sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of
any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault
on sanity and decency; and even–since some of Dali's pictures
would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic
postcard–on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has
imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the
bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as
anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a
society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord
Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to THE TIMES leader writers who exult
over the 'eclipse of the highbrow'–in fact, to any 'sensible'
art-hating English person–it is easy to imagine what kind of
response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit
in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that
what is morally degraded can be asthetically right, but their real
demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and
tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially
dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of
Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For
their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears,
but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed
highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America,
with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but
even against T. S. Eliot.

But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali's merits,
the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you
say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little
scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you
don't like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting
corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the
aesthetic sense. Since 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab' is a good
composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle
position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side
KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other (though the phrase itself is out
of fashion) 'Art for Art's sake.' Obscenity is a very difficult
question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of
seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able
to define the relationship between art and morals.

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is
a kind of BENEFIT OF CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the
moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the
magic word 'Art', and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in
the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. [Note, below]
It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and
then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long
as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be
forgiven you.

[Note: Dali mentions L'Age d'Or and adds that its first public
showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail
what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it
showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman
defecating. (Author's Footnote)]

One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover
ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an
altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount
of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one
would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder,
nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted.
If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were
found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in
railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on
the ground that he might write another KING LEAR. And, after all,
the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging
necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by,
say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in
one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good
draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not
invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that
we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it
is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is
separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world
deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In
the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book or
a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.'
Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking
the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a
human being.

Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures,
ought to be suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used to
be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to
suppress anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light
on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs
is diagnosis. The question is not so much WHAT he is as WHY he is
like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a diseased
intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion,
since genuine penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do
not flaunt their past vices in that complacent way. He is a symptom
of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him
as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius
who ought not to be questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits
that particular set of aberrations.

The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I
myself am not competent to examine. But I can point to one clue
which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the
old-fashioned, over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali
tends to revert when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali's
drawings are reminiscent of Dürer, one (p. 113) seems to show
the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the
Edwardian one. When I opened the book for the first time and looked
at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I was haunted by a
resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at
the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What
did this remind me of? Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of
a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in
translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had
ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dali's
candlestick displays at one end a curly fish-like creature that
looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on the conventional
dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle,
which recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend.
You will find it, with the same picturesque gouts of wax arranged
on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This
candle, and the design beneath it, convey at once an intense
feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract this, Dali has
spattered a quillful of ink all over the page, but without avail.
The same impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign
at the bottom of page 62, for instance, would nearly go into PETER
PAN. The figure on page 224, in spite of having her cranium
elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the
fairy-tale books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218
might be illustrations to James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified
drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere convey the same
impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away the
skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and
every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham,
Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS.

Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali's
autobiography tie up with the same period. When I read the passage
I quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little sister's
head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was it? Of
course! RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham. Such
rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:

Poor little Willy is crying so sore,
A sad little boy is he,
For he's broken his little sister's neck
And he'll have no jam for tea.

might almost have been founded on Dali's anecdote. Dali, of
course, is aware of his Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out
of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an
especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every
ornamental object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism,
madness, perversity, et. Pastiche, however, usually implies a real
affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the rule,
at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be
accompanied by a non-rational, even childish urge in the same
direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in planes and
curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of
mucking about with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who
enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos and smell of oil. A
psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual aberration
himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country
gentleman and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dali's
seemingly perverse cult of Edwardian things (for example, his
'discovery' of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely the symptom of
a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable,
beautifully executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly
labelled LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all
over his margins, may be meant partly as a joke. The little boy in
knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect
period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali
can't help drawing that kind of thing because it is to that period
and that style of drawing that he really belongs.

If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a
way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two
qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing
and an atrocious egoism. 'At seven', he says in the first paragraph
of his book, 'I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been
growing steadily ever since.' This is worded in a deliberately
startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings
are common enough. 'I knew I was a genius', somebody once said to
me, 'long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.' And
suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a
dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your
real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of
drawing, your real MÉTIER to be an illustrator of scientific
textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?

There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing
that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a
bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break
his spectacles–or, at any rate, dream about doing such
things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with
a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself
original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than
crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali's
autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his
eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up
into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when
sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital
swarmed with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and
politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead
donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for
grasshoppers–which a few decades back would merely have
provoked a snigger–was now an interesting 'complex' which
could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world
collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could
even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and
without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris
to Abraham's bosom.

That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali's history. But
why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and
why it should be so easy to 'sell' such horrors as rotting corpses
to a sophisticated public–those are questions for the
psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a
short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are 'bourgeois
decadence' (much play is made with the phrases 'corpse poisons' and
'decaying RENTIER class'), and that is that. But though this
probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One
would still like to know WHY Dali's leaning was towards necrophilia
(and not, say, homosexuality), and WHY the RENTIERS and the
aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making
love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get
one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of
'detachment', that such pictures as 'Mannequin rotting in a
taxicab' are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and
any investigation ought to start out from that fact.

RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH (1944)

Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, 'the
amateur cracksman', is still one of the best-known characters in
English fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played
cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and
burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest. Just
for that reason he and his exploits make a suitable background
against which to examine a more modern crime story such as NO
ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. Any such choice is necessarily
arbitrary–I might equally well have chosen ARSÈNE
LUPIN for instance–but at any rate NO ORCHIDS and the Raffles
books [Note, below] have the common quality of being crime stories
which play the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman.
For sociological purposes they can be compared. NO ORCHIDS is the
1939 version of glamorized crime, RAFFLES the 1900 version. What I
am concerned with here is the immense difference in moral
atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular
attitude that this probably implies.

[Note: RAFFLES, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT and MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES, by
E. W. Hornung. The third of these is definitely a failure, and only
the first has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number
of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the
criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as RAFFLES is
STIUGAREE. (Author's footnote.)]

At this date, the charm of RAFFLES is partly in the period
atmosphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories.
Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able
writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work.
However, the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that
makes him a sort of byword even to this day (only a few weeks ago,
in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as 'a
Raffles in real life'), is the fact that he is a GENTLEMAN. Raffles
is presented to us and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of
dialogue and casual remarks–not as an honest man who has gone
astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His
remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has
disgraced 'the old school', he has lost his right to enter 'decent
society', he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad.
Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that
stealing is wrong in itself, though Raffles does once justify
himself by the casual remark that 'the distribution of property is
all wrong anyway'. They think of themselves not as sinners but as
renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral code of most of us
is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his situation to
be an especially ironical one. A West End club man who is really a
burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it
were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would
there be anything inherently dramatic in that? No although the
theme of the 'double life', of respectability covering crime, is
still there. Even Charles Peace in his clergyman's dog-collar,
seems somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari
blazer.

Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly
fitting that his chosen game should be cricket. This allows not
only of endless analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler and
his cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature
of his crime. Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in
England–it is nowhere so popular as football, for
instance–but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in
the English character, the tendency to value 'form' or 'style' more
highly than success. In the eyes of any true cricket-lover it is
possible for an innings of ten runs to be 'better' (i.e. more
elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of
the very few games in which the amateur can excel the professional.
It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of
fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is
partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance, practised
bodyline bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any
rule: he was merely doing something that was 'not cricket'. Since
cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to
play, it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the whole
nation it is bound up with such concepts as 'good form', 'playing
the game', etc., and it has declined in popularity just as the
tradition of 'don't hit a man when he's down' has declined. It is
not a twentieth-century game, and nearly all modern-minded people
dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were at pains to discourage
cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany before and
after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a
burglar, Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible
disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he
was able to imagine.

RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR,
is a story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the
precariousness of Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would
have made the 'gentleman burglar' a member of the peerage, or at
least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class origin
and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal
charm. 'We were in Society but not of it', he says to Bunny towards
the end of the book; and 'I was asked about for my cricket'. Both
he and Bunny accept the values of 'Society' unquestioningly, and
would settle down in it for good if only they could get away with a
big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them is all the
blacker because they only doubtfully 'belong'. A duke who has
served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about
town, if once disgraced, ceases to be 'about town' for evermore.
The closing chapters of the book, when Raffles has been exposed and
is living under an assumed name, have a twilight of the gods
feeling, a mental atmosphere rather similar to that of Kipling's
poem, 'Gentleman Rankers':

Yes, a trooper of the forces–Who has run his own six
horses! etc.

Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the 'cohorts of the damned'.
He can still commit successful burglaries, but there is no way back
into Paradise, which means Piccadilly and the M.C.C. According to
the public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation:
death in battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a
practised reader would foresee this from the start), and in the
eyes of both Bunny and his creator this cancels his crimes.

Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious
belief, and they have no real ethical code, merely certain rules of
behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively. But it is just
here that the deep moral difference between RAFFLES and NO ORCHIDS
becomes apparent. Raffles and Bunny, after all, are gentlemen, and
such standards as they do have are not to be violated. Certain
things are 'not done', and the idea of doing them hardly arises.
Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He will commit a
burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the victim
must be a fellow-guest and not the host. He will not commit murder
[Note, below], and he avoids violence wherever possible and prefers
to carry out his robberies unarmed. He regards friendship as
sacred, and is chivalrous though not moral in his relations with
women. He will take extra risks in the name of 'sportsmanship', and
sometimes even for aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is
intensively patriotic. He celebrates the Diamond Jubilee ('For
sixty years, Bunny, we've been ruled over by absolutely the finest
sovereign the world has ever seen') by dispatching to the Queen,
through the post, an antique gold cup which he has stolen from the
British Museum. He steals, from partly political motives, a pearl
which the German Emperor is sending to one of the enemies of
Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go badly his one thought
is to find his way into the fighting line. At the front he unmasks
a spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies
gloriously by a Boer bullet. In this combination of crime and
patriotism he resembles his near-contemporary Arsène Lupin,
who also scores off the German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty
past by enlisting in the Foreign Legion.

[Note: Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less
consciously responsible for the death of two others. But all three
of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible
manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a
blackmailer. It is however, a fairly well-established convention in
crime stories that murdering a blackmailer 'doesn't count'.
(Author's footnote, 1945.)]

It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles's
crimes are very petty ones. Four hundred pounds worth of jewellery
seems to him an excellent haul. And though the stories are
convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little
sensationalism–very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex
crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind. It seems to be the
case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has
greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty
years. Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a
murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all
murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable
crime. So also with the John Thorndyke stories, while of the Max
Carrados stories only a minority are murders. Since 1918, however,
a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity,
and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are
commonly exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance,
display an extremely morbid interest in corpses. The Raffles
stories, written from the angle of the criminal, are much less
anti-social than many modern stories written from the angle of the
detective. The main impression that they leave behind is of
boyishness. They belong to a time when people had standards, though
they happened to be foolish standards. Their key-phrase is 'not
done'. The line that they draw between good and evil is as
senseless as a Polynesian taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it
has the advantage that everyone accepts it.

So much for RAFFLES. Now for a header into the cesspool. NO
ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, by James Hadley Chase, was published in
1939, but seems to have enjoyed its greatest popularity in 1940,
during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. In its main outlines
its story is this:

Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by
some gangsters who are almost immediately surprised and killed off
by a larger and better organized gang. They hold her to ransom and
extract half a million dollars from her father. Their original plan
had been to kill her as soon as the ransom-money was received, but
a chance keeps her alive. One of the gang is a young man named
Slim, whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into
other people's bellies. In childhood he has graduated by cutting up
living animals with a pair of rusty scissors. Slim is sexually
impotent, but takes a kind of fancy to Miss Blandish. Slim's
mother, who is the real brains of the gang, sees in this the chance
of curing Slim's impotence, and decides to keep Miss Blandish in
custody till Slim shall have succeeded in raping her. After many
efforts and much persuasion, including the flogging of Miss
Blandish with a length of rubber hosepipe, the rape is achieved.
Meanwhile Miss Blandish's father has hired a private detective, and
by means of bribery and torture the detective and the police manage
to round up and exterminate the whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss
Blandish and is killed after a final rape, and the detective
prepares to restore Miss Blandish to her family. By this time,
however, she has developed such a taste for Slim's caresses [Note,
below] that she feels unable to live without him, and she jumps,
out of the window of a sky-scraper.

Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full
implications of this book. To begin with, its central story bears a
very marked resemblance to William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary.
Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an
illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a
wasted word or a jarring note anywhere. Thirdly, the whole book,
récit as well as dialogue, is written in the American
language; the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been
in the United States, seems to have made a complete mental
transference to the American underworld. Fourthly, the book sold,
according to its publishers, no less than half a million
copies.

I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much
more sordid and brutal than this suggests. The book contains eight
full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and
woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench),
the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with
red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of
unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind. It assumes great
sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for
instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency,
has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and it takes for
granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm
of human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great
a rogue as the gangsters, and actuated by nearly the same motives.
Like them, he is in pursuit of 'five hundred grand'. It is
necessary to the machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish should be
anxious to get his daughter back, but apart from this, such things
as affection, friendship, good nature or even ordinary politeness
simply do not enter. Nor, to any great extent does normal
sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the
whole story: the pursuit of power.

[Note: Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may
mean merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation
I have given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality
of the book. (Author's footnote, 1945)]

It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense
pornography. Unlike most books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays
the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure. Slim, the
ravisher of Miss Blandish, has 'wet slobbering lips': this is
disgusting, and it is meant to be disgusting. But the scenes
describing cruelty to women are comparatively perfunctory. The real
high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by men upon other
men; above all, the third-degreeing of the gangster, Eddie Schultz,
who is lashed into a chair and flogged on the windpipe with
truncheons, his arms broken by fresh blows as he breaks loose. In
another of Mr. Chase's books, HE WON'T NEED IT NOW, the hero, who
is intended to be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character,
is described as stamping on somebody's face, and then, having
crushed the man's mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in
it. Even when physical incidents of this kind are not occurring,
the mental atmosphere of these books is always the same. Their
whole theme is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong
over the weak. The big gangsters wipe out the little ones as
mercilessly as a pike gobbling up the little fish in a pond; the
police kill off the criminals as cruelly as the angler kills the
pike. If ultimately one sides with the police against the
gangsters, it is merely because they are better organized and more
powerful, because, in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime.
Might is right: vae victis.

As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS enjoyed its greatest
vogue in 1940, though it was successfully running as a play till
some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to
console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war
the NEW YORKER had a picture of a little man approaching a
news-stall littered with paper with such headlines as 'Great Tank
Battles in Northern France', 'Big Naval Battle in the North Sea',
'Huge Air Battles over the Channel', etc., etc. The little man is
saying 'ACTION STORIES, please'. That little man stood for all the
drugged millions to whom the world of the gangster and the
prize-ring is more 'real', more 'tough', than such things as wars,
revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point
of view of a reader of ACTION STORIES, a description of the London
blitz, or of the struggles of the European underground parties,
would be 'sissy stuff'. On the other hand, some puny gun-battle in
Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem
genuinely 'tough'. This habit of mind is now extremely widespread.
A soldier sprawls in a muddy trench, with the machine-gun bullets
crackling a foot or two overhead, and whiles away his intolerable
boredom by reading an American gangster story. And what is it that
makes that story so exciting? Precisely the fact that people are
shooting at each other with machine-guns! Neither the soldier nor
anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is taken for granted
that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one.

The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a
passive victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of
oneself as being at the centre of events. But there is more to it
than that. Here it is necessary to refer again to the curious fact
of NO ORCHIDS being written–with technical errors, perhaps,
but certainly with considerable skill–in the American
language.

There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less
the same stamp as NO ORCHIDS. Quite apart from books, there is the
huge array of 'pulp magazines', graded so as to cater for different
kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same mental
atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the
great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists.
Sold at threepence a copy under the title of Yank Mags, [Note,
below] these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in
England, but when the supply dried up owing to the war, no
satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English imitations of the
'pulp magazine' do now exist, but they are poor things compared
with the original. English crook films, again, never approach the
American crook film in brutality. And yet the career of Mr. Chase
shows how deep the American influence has already gone. Not only is
he himself living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago
underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of readers
who know what is meant by a 'clipshop' or the 'hotsquat', do not
have to do mental arithmetic when confronted by 'fifty grand', and
understand at sight a sentence like 'Johnny was a rummy and only
two jumps ahead of the nut-factory'. Evidently there are great
numbers of English people who are partly Americanized in language
and, one ought to add, in moral outlook. For there was no popular
protest against NO ORCHIDS. In the end it was withdrawn, but only
retrospectively, when a later work, MISS CALLAGHAN COMES TO GRIEF,
brought Mr. Chase's books to the attention of the authorities.
Judging by casual conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a
mild thrill out of the obscenities of NO ORCHIDS, but saw nothing
undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people, incidentally, were
under the impression that it was an American book reissued in
England.

[Note: They are said to have been imported into this country as
ballast which accounted for their low price and crumped appearance.
Since the war the ships have been ballasted with something more
useful, probably gravel. (Author's footnote)]

The thing that the ordinary reader OUGHT to have objected
to–almost certainly would have objected to, a few decades
earlier–was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is
implied throughout NO ORCHIDS that being a criminal is only
reprehensible in the sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman
pays better, but there is no moral difference, since the police use
essentially criminal methods. In a book like HE WON'T NEED IT NOW
the distinction between crime and crime-prevention practically
disappears. This is a new departure for English sensational
fiction, in which till recently there has always been a sharp
distinction between right and wrong and a general agreement that
virtue must triumph in the last chapter. English books glorifying
crime (modern crime, that is–pirates and highwaymen are
different) are very rare. Even a book like RAFFLES, as I have
pointed out, is governed by powerful taboos, and it is clearly
understood that Raffles's crimes must be expiated sooner or later.
In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate
crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is success, is
very much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that
has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale.
Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different
in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord
Northcliffe and all the rest of the 'log cabin to White House'
brigade. And switching back eighty years, one finds Mark Twain
adopting much the same attitude towards the disgusting bandit
Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western
desperadoes generally. They were successful, they 'made good',
therefore he admired them.

In a book like NO ORCHIDS one is not, as in the old-style crime
story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of
action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual
perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which
RAFFLES or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time
the English attitude towards crime is not so superior to the
American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is mixed up with
power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last twenty
years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially
in such typical books as THE ORATOR and the Mr. J. G. Reeder
stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-story writers to break
away from the old tradition of the private detective and make his
central figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an
amateur, solving his problems without the help and even, in the
earlier stories, against the opposition of the police. Moreover,
like Lupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a scientist. He
reasons logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is
constantly contrasted with the routine methods of the police.
Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it, on
Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his
way to denounce Holmes byname. His own ideal was the
detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is
intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful
organization. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most
characteristic stories the 'clue' and the 'deduction' play no part.
The criminal is always defeated by an incredible coincidence, or
because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the
crime beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that
Wallace's admiration for the police is pure bully-worship. A
Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he
can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw
against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in
the Roman arena. His policemen behave much more brutally than
British policemen do in real life–they hit people with out
provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so
on–and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual
sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the
villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But
it is sadism after the English fashion: that is to say, it is
unconscious, there is not overtly any sex in it, and it keeps
within the bounds of the law. The British public tolerates a harsh
criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder
trials: but still that is better, on any account, than tolerating
or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it is better that
he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed
to some extent by the concept of 'not done.' In NO ORCHIDS anything
is 'done' so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers are
down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse symptom
than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than
boxing, or Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.

In borrowing from William Faulkner's SANCTUARY, Chase only took
the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar.
Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of
borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization
of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens
faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as 'Faulkner
for the masses', but it would be more accurate to describe him as
Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer–there are many
such in America, but they are still rarities in England–who
has caught up with what is now fashionable to call 'realism',
meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of 'realism'
has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own
age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The
interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship,
power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject
whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is
considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example
that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the
sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less
suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's
admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with
sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the
most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the
countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not
different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or
Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached 'punch',
'drive', 'personality' and 'learn to be a Tiger man' in the
nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals,
Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German
militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful
cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to
be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness FOR THEIR OWN
SAKES. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a
bloodstained crook as well, and 'the end justifies the means' often
becomes, in effect, 'the means justify themselves provided they are
dirty enough'. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers
with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive
delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the
Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the
U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be
admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and
self-contradictory, could come afterwards.

Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the
English-speaking peoples have been stories in which the hero fights
AGAINST ODDS. This is true all the way from Robin Hood to Pop-eye
the Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack the
Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this should be renamed
Jack the Dwarf-killer, and there already exists a considerable
literature which teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one
should side with the big man against the little man. Most of what
is now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this
theme, and for several decades such phrases as 'Play the game',
'Don't hit a man when he's down' and 'It's not cricket' have never
failed to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions.
What is comparatively new is to find the accepted pattern,
according to which (a) right is right and wrong is wrong, whoever
wins, and (b) weakness must be respected, disappearing from popular
literature as well. When I first read D. H. Lawrence's novels, at
the age of about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there did
not seem to be any classification of the characters into 'good' and
'bad'. Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them about
equally, and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of
having lost my bearings. Today no one would think of looking for
heroes and villains in a serious novel, but in lowbrow fiction one
still expects to find a sharp distinction between right and wrong
and between legality and illegality. The common people, on the
whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from
which the intellectuals have long since escaped. But the popularity
of NO ORCHIDS and the American books and magazines to which it is
akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of 'realism' is gaining
ground.

Several people, after reading NO ORCHIDS, have remarked to me,
'It's pure Fascism'. This is a correct description, although the
book has not the smallest connexion with politics and very little
with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation
to Fascism as, say Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-century
capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In
his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a
distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such
things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture
to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial,
floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools,
systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery,
bribery, and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even
admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. The average
man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads, he
wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a
simple story about individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and
Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and the Gestapo. People
worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.
A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a
Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business
college worships Lord Nuffield. A NEW STATESMAN reader worships
Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in
moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had
nothing in common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and
the idols of the English liberal intelligentsia were also
comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the
one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other,
there is a similar gulf.

One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's
books. It is possible that it is an isolated phenomenon, brought
about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war. But if such
books should definitely acclimatize themselves in England, instead
of being merely a half-understood import from America, there would
be good grounds for dismay. In choosing RAFFLES as a background for
NO ORCHIDS I deliberately chose a book which by the standards of
its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, as I have pointed out, has
no real moral code, no religion, certainly no social consciousness.
All he has is a set of reflexes the nervous system, as it were, of
a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this reflex or that (they are
called 'sport', 'pal', 'woman', 'king and country' and so forth),
and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr. Chase's books there are
no gentlemen and no taboos. Emancipation is complete. Freud and
Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing the schoolboy
atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of the
other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is
a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has
been underrated.

ANTISEMITISM IN BRITAIN (1945)

There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition
some thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees
who have entered the country from 1934 onwards. The Jewish
population is almost entirely concentrated in half a dozen big
towns and is mostly employed in the food, clothing and furniture
trades. A few of the big monopolies, such as the ICI, one or two
leading newspapers and at least one big chain of department stores
are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but it would be very far
from the truth to say that British business life is dominated by
Jews. The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to keep up
with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have
remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on
a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.

I start off with these background facts, which are already known
to any well-informed person, in order to emphasise that there is no
real Jewish "problem" in England. The Jews are not numerous or
powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called
"intellectual circles" that they have any noticeable influence. Yet
it is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase, that
it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and
enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent
forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and
law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable
circumstances it could have political results. Here are some
samples of antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the
past year or two:

Middle-aged office employee: "I generally come to work by bus.
It takes longer, but I don't care about using the Underground from
Golders Green nowadays. There's too many of the Chosen Race
travelling on that line."

Tobacconist (woman): "No, I've got no matches for you. I should
try the lady down the street. SHE'S always got matches. One of the
Chosen Race, you see."

Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: "No, I do NOT
like Jews. I've never made any secret of that. I can't stick them.
Mind you, I'm not antisemitic, of course."

Middle-class woman: "Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but
I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking.
The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on.
They're so abominably selfish. I think they're responsible for a
lot of what happens to them."

Milk roundsman: "A Jew don't do no work, not the same as what an
Englishman does. 'E's too clever. We work with this 'ere" (flexes
his biceps). "They work with that there" (taps his forehead).

Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected
way: "These bloody Yids are all pro-German. They'd change sides
tomorrow if the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them in my business.
They admire Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They'll always
suck up to anyone who kicks them."

Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with
antisemitism and German atrocities: "Don't show it me, PLEASE don't
show it to me. It'll only make me hate the Jews more than
ever."

I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go
on with. Two facts emerge from them. One–which is very
important and which I must return to in a moment–is that
above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being
antisemitic and are careful to draw a distinction between
"antisemitism" and "disliking Jews". The other is that antisemitism
is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences
(for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person
speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these
accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To
attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and
may sometimes be worse than useless. As the last of the
above-quoted remarks shows, people can remain antisemitic, or at
least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is
indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is
an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of
his virtues.

It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of
antisemitism and even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given
some justification for it. To begin with, the Jews are one people
of whom it can be said with complete certainty that they will
benefit by an Allied victory. Consequently the theory that "this is
a Jewish war" has a certain plausibility, all the more so because
the Jewish war effort seldom gets its fair share of recognition.
The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organisation held
together largely by mutual consent, and it is often necessary to
flatter the less reliable elements at the expense of the more loyal
ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to
admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle
East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries and
elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the
man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally
clever at dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be
found in exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity
with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned
with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco–exactly the
commodities of which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent
overcharging, black-marketing and favouritism. And again, the
common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally cowardly way
during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big
raids of 1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel
was one of the first areas to be heavily blitzed, with the natural
result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed themselves all
over London. If one judged merely from these war-time phenomena, it
would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a quasi-rational
thing, founded on mistaken premises. And naturally the antisemite
thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on
this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a
considerable "come-back", and invariably some of the letters are
from well-balanced, middling people–doctors, for
example–with no apparent economic grievance. These people
always say (as Hitler says in MEIN KAMPF) that they started out
with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present
position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the marks of
antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not
possibly be true. One could see a good example of this in the
strange accident that occurred in London in 1942, when a crowd,
frightened by a bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth of an
Underground station, with the result that something over a hundred
people were crushed to death. The very same day it was repeated all
over London that "the Jews were responsible". Clearly, if people
will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much further by
arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover WHY they
can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining
sane on others.

But now let me come back to that point I mentioned
earlier–that there is widespread awareness of the prevalence
of antisemitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it.
Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable
sin and in a quite different category from other kinds of racial
prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that
they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession service on
behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St John's
Wood. The local authorities declared themselves anxious to
participate in it, and the service was attended by the mayor of the
borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the
churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy
Scouts and what not. On the surface it was a touching demonstration
of solidarity with the suffering Jews. But it was essentially a
CONSCIOUS effort to behave decently by people whose subjective
feelings must in many cases have been very different. That quarter
of London is partly Jewish, antisemitism is rife there, and, as I
well knew, some of the men sitting round me in the synagogue were
tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my own platoon of Home
Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that we should
"make a good show" at the intercession service, was an ex-member of
Mosley's Blackshirts. While this division of feeling exists,
tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more
important, antisemitic legislation, are not possible in England. It
is not at present possible, indeed, that antisemitism should BECOME
RESPECTABLE. But this is less of an advantage than it might
appear.

One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent
antisemitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief
inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago,
but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then
its findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there
has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of
anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the
Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals
and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish
character into a novel or short story came to be regarded as
antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was DE RIGUEUR among
enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid
examining the claims of the Arabs–a decision which might be
correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because
the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not
criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in
which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while
in private antisemitism was on the up-grade, even, to some extent,
among sensitive and intelligent people. This was particularly
noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees.
Naturally, every thinking person felt that it was his duty to
protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate foreigners
who for the most part were only in England because they were
opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different
sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved in an
exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily
had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A
very eminent figure in the Labour Party–I won't name him, but
he is one of the most respected people in England–said to me
quite violently: "We never asked these people to come to this
country. If they choose to come here, let them take the
consequences." Yet this man would as a matter of course have
associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto against
the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is
something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person
does not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and
indeed many people will admit that they are frightened of probing
too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say,
of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that
they themselves are infected by it.

To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to
the days when Hitler was an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody
had heard of. One would then find that though antisemitism is
sufficiently in evidence now, it is probably LESS prevalent in
England than it was thirty years ago. It is true that antisemitism
as a fully thought-out racial or religious doctrine has never
flourished in England. There has never been much feeling against
inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent part in public
life. Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more or less
as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and–though
superior in intelligence–slightly deficient in "character".
In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect
he was debarred from certain professions. He would probably not
have been accepted as an officer in the navy, for instance, nor in
what is called a "smart" regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a
public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of
course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming
or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a
stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise themselves
under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average
person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it
seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible.
About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with
a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us
and began a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on
a ship and wanting money to get back. His manner and appearance
were difficult to "place", and I said to him:

"You speak very good English. What nationality are you?"

He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: "I am a JOO,
sir!"

And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly
in joke, "He admits it openly." All the Jews I had known till then
were people who were ashamed of being Jews, or at any rate
preferred not to talk about their ancestry, and if forced to do so
tended to use the word "Hebrew".

The working-class attitude was no better. The Jew who grew up in
Whitechapel took it for granted that he would be assaulted, or at
least hooted at, if he ventured into one of the Christian slums
nearby, and the "Jew joke" of the music halls and the comic papers
was almost consistently ill-natured. [Note at end of paragraph]
There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands of Belloc,
Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level
of scurrility. Non-Catholic writers were sometimes guilty of the
same thing in a milder form. There has been a perceptible
antisemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and
without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can
think of passages which IF WRITTEN NOW would be stigmatised as
antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray,
Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various
others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who,
before the days of Hitler, made a definite effort to stick up for
Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade. And however little the average
intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and
Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton's
endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and
essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him into
trouble–indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally
respected figures in English literary life. Anyone who wrote in
that strain NOW would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or
more probably would find it impossible to get his writings
published.

[Note: It is interesting to compare the "Jew joke" with that
other stand-by of the music halls, the "Scotch joke", which
superficially it resembles. Occasionally a story is told (e.g. the
Jew and the Scotsman who went into a pub together and both died of
thirst) which puts both races on an equality, but in general the
Jew is credited MERELY with cunning and avarice while the Scotsman
is credited with physical hardihood as well. This is seen, for
example, in the story of the Jew and the Scotsman who go together
to a meeting which has been advertised as free. Unexpectedly there
is a collection, and to avoid this the Jew faints and the Scotsman
carries him out. Here the Scotsman performs the athletic feat of
carrying the other. It would seem vaguely wrong if it were the
other way about. (Author's footnote.)]

If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty
widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has
genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division
between the politically conscious person who realises that this is
not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person
whose native antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the
war. One can assume, therefore, that many people who would perish
rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to
them. I have already indicated that I believe antisemitism to be
essentially a neurosis, but of course it has its rationalisations,
which are sincerely believed in and are partly true. The
rationalisation put forward by the common man is that the Jew is an
exploiter. The partial justification for this is that the Jew, in
England, is generally a small businessman–that is to say a
person whose depredations are more obvious and intelligible than
those of, say, a bank or an insurance company. Higher up the
intellectual scale, antisemitism is rationalised by saying that the
Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens national
morale. Again there is some superficial justification for this.
During the past twenty-five years the activities of what are called
"intellectuals" have been largely mischievous. I do not think it an
exaggeration to say that if the "intellectuals" had done their work
a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940.
But the disaffected intelligentsia inevitably included a large
number of Jews. With some plausibility it can be said that the Jews
are the enemies of our native culture and our national morale.
Carefully examined, the claim is seen to be nonsense, but there are
always a few prominent individuals who can be cited in support of
it. During the past few years there has been what amounts to a
counter-attack against the rather shallow Leftism which was
fashionable in the previous decade and which was exemplified by
such organisations as the Left Book Club. This counter-attack (see
for instance such books as Arnold Lutin's THE GOOD GORILLA or
Evelyn Waugh's PUT OUT MORE FLAGS) has an antisemitic strain, and
it would probably be more marked if the subject were not so
obviously dangerous. It so happens that for some decades past
Britain has had no nationalist intelligentsia worth bothering
about. But British nationalism, i.e. nationalism of an intellectual
kind, may revive, and probably will revive if Britain comes out of
the present war greatly weakened. The young intellectuals of 1950
may be as naively patriotic as those of 1914. In that case the kind
of antisemitism which flourished among the anti-Dreyfusards in
France, and which Chesterton and Belloc tried to import into this
country, might get a foothold.

I have no hard-and-fast theory about the origins of
antisemitism. The two current explanations, that it is due to
economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy from the
Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one
combines them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say
with confidence is that antisemitism is part of the larger problem
of nationalism, which has not yet been seriously examined, and that
the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat
we do not yet know. In this essay I have relied almost entirely on
my own limited experience, and perhaps every one of my conclusions
would be negatived by other observers. The fact is that there are
almost no data on this subject. But for what they are worth I will
summarise my opinions. Boiled down, they amount to this:

There is more antisemitism in England than we care to admit, and
the war has accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the
increase if one thinks in terms of decades rather than years.

It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the
effect of making people callous to the sufferings of Jews in other
countries.

It is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to
argument.

The persecutions in Germany have caused much concealment of
antisemitic feeling and thus obscured the whole picture.

The subject needs serious investigation.

Only the last point is worth expanding. To study any subject
scientifically one needs a detached attitude, which is obviously
harder when one's own interests or emotions are involved. Plenty of
people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins,
say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to
think about the sources of their own income. What vitiates nearly
all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the
writer's mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. "Since I know that
antisemitism is irrational," he argues, "it follows that I do not
share it." He thus fails to start his investigation in the one
place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence–that
is, in his own mind.

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called
nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one
manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the
disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be
antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely
antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes
display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point
is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern
civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to
this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are
mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern
intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without
coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or
another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such
things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that
gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen,
therefore, that the starting point for any investigation of
antisemitism should not be "Why does this obviously irrational
belief appeal to other people?" but "Why does antisemitism appeal
TO ME? What is there about it that I feel to be true?" If one asks
this question one at least discovers one's own rationalisations,
and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them.
Antisemitism should be investigated–and I will not say by
antisemites, but at any rate by people who know that they are not
immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has disappeared a real
enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably
be best to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling
all the justifications for it that can be found, in one's own mind
or anybody else's. In that way one might get some clues that would
lead to its psychological roots. But that antisemitism will be
definitively CURED, without curing the larger disease of
nationalism, I do not believe.

FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)

A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside
Hyde Park were arrested by the police for obstruction. When taken
before the magistrates, they were all found guilty, four of them
being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty
shillings fine or a month's imprisonments. He preferred to serve
his term.

The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD
and FREEDOM, besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the
organ of the Peace Pledge Union, FREEDOM (till recently called WAR
COMMENTARY) is that of the Anarchists; as for FORWARD, its politics
defy definition, but at any rate it is violently Left. The
magistrate, in passing sentence, stated that he was not influenced
by the nature of the literature that was being sold; he was
concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and that this
offence had technically been committed.

This raises several important points. To begin with, how does
the law stand on the subject? As far as I can discover, selling
newspapers in the street is technically an obstruction, at any rate
if you fail to move when the police tell you to. So it would be
legally possible for any policeman who felt like it to arrest any
newsboy for selling the EVENING NEWS. Obviously this doesn't
happen, so that the enforcement of the law depends on the
discretion of the police.

And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than
another? However it may be with the magistrate, I find it hard to
believe that in this case the police were not influenced by
political considerations. It is a bit too much of a coincidence
that they should have picked on people selling just those
papers.

If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET,
or the SPECTATOR, or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality
would be easier to believe in.

The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or
Gestapo, but I do not think [sic] one maligns them in saying that,
in the past, they have been unfriendly to Left-wing activities.
They have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they
regarded as the defenders of private property. Till quite recently
"red" and "illegal" were almost synonymous, and it was always the
seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never the seller of say, the DAILY
TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally harassed. Apparently it
can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a Labour
Government.

A thing I would like to know–it is a thing we hear very
little about–is what changes are made in the administrative
personnel when there has been a change of government.. Does a
police officer who has a vague notion that "Socialism" means
something against the law carry on just the same when the
government itself is Socialist?

When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to
Scotland Yard Special Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not
told, but such symptoms as there are do not suggest that any very
extensive shuffling is going on.

However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of
newspapers and pamphlets should be interfered with at all. Which
particular minority is singled out–whether Pacifists,
Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah's Witness of the Legion of
Christian Reformers who recently declared Hitler to be Jesus
Christ–is a secondary matter. It is of symptomatic importance
that these people should have been arrested at that particular
spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but
for many years past it has been usual for the paper-sellers to
station themselves outside the gates and distribute literature
connected with the open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every
kind of publication has been sold there without interference.

The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is
often over-rated. Technically there is great freedom, but the fact
that most of the press is owned by a few people operates in much
the same way as State censorship. On the other hand, freedom of
speech is real. On a platform, or in certain recognised open air
spaces like Hyde Park, you can say almost anything, and, what is
perhaps more significant, no one is frightened to utter his true
opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and so forth.

The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of
public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws,
but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave,
depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of
people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom
of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is
sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws
exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual
liberty has not been so sharp as I would have predicted six years
ago, when the war was starting, but still there has been a decline.
The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing
is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the
issue by not distinguishing between democratic opposition and open
rebellion, and it is reflected in our growing indifference to
tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare themselves
to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim
when it is their own adversaries who are being prosecutued.

I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling
harmless newspapers is a major calamity. When you see what is
happening in the world today, it hardly seems worth squealing about
such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good symptom that
such things should happen when the war is well over, and I should
feel happier if this and the long series of similar episodes that
have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine popular
clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority
press.

FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)

As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the
devastation wrought by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare,
there are three comments that almost every observer finds himself
making. The first is: 'The people at home have no conception of
this.' The second is, 'It's a miracle that they've gone on
fighting.' And the third is, 'Just think of the work of building
this all up again!'

It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of
Germany is even now not realised in this country, and its share in
the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much underrated.
It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the
man in the street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have
done to Germany over the past four years is merely the same kind of
thing they did to us in 1940.

But this error, which must be even commoner in the United
States, has in it a potential danger, and the many protests against
indiscriminate bombing which have been uttered by pacifists and
humanitarians have merely confused the issue.

Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and
the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and
transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or
'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects
and enormously so of human lives.

Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population,
whereas the men killed in battle are exactly the ones that the
community can least afford to lose. The people of Britain have
never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they
will be ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have
definitely defeated them; but what they still have not
grasped–-thanks to their own comparative immunity–-is
the frightful destructiveness of modern war and the long period of
impoverishment that now lies ahead of the world as a whole.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an
actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to
remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The
same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all
the way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been
ground fighting, the destruction is even more thorough. In the 300
miles or so between the Marne and the Rhine there is not such a
thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.

Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses,
and that the chances of getting them within measurable time seem
rather slender. But how many houses will Germany need, or Poland or
the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task of
rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long
period must elapse before even the standards of living of 1939 can
be re-established.

We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been
done to Germany but judging from the areas that have been overrun
hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the power of the Germans to
pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply
to re-house the German people, to set the shattered factories
working, and to keep German agriculture from collapsing after the
foreign workers have been liberated, will use up all the labour
that the Germans are likely to dispose of.

If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for
reconstruction work, the recovery of Germany itself will be all the
slower. After the last war, the impossibility of obtaining
substantial money reparations was finally grasped, but it was less
generally realised that the impoverishment of any one country
reacts unfavourably on the world as a whole. It would be no
advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.

GOOD BAD BOOKS

Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an
introduction for a reprint of a novel by Leonard Merrick. This
publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long series of
minor and partly-forgotten novels of the twentieth century. It is a
valuable service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the
person whose job it will be to scout round the threepenny boxes,
hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.

A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days,
but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad
book": that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions
but which remains readable when more serious productions have
perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are RAFFLES and
the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when
innumerable "problem novels", "human documents" and "terrible
indictments" of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion.
(Who has worn better, Conan Doyle or Meredith?) Almost in the same
class as these I, put R. Austin Freeman's earlier
stories–"The Singing Bone" "The Eye of Osiris" and
others–Ernest Bramah's MAX CARRADOS, and, dropping the
standard a bit, Guy Boothby's Tibetan thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort
of schoolboy version of Hue's TRAVELS IN TARTARY, which would
probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal
anticlimax.

But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers
of the period. For example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length
books no longer seem readable–E. Nesbit (THE TREASURE
SEEKERS), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he kept off
politics, the pornographic Binstead ("Pitcher" of the PINK 'UN),
and, if American books can be included, Booth Tarkington's Penrod
stories. A cut above most of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain's
humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print, but to anyone who
comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare
book–THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in the
macabre. Somewhat later in time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote
in the W.W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern seaport towns, and who
seems to be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having been
praised in print by H.G. Wells.

However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly
"escape" literature. They form pleasant patches in one's memory,
quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments, but they
hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is
another kind of good bad book which is more seriously intended, and
which tells us, I think, something about the nature of the novel
and the reasons for its present decadence. During the last fifty
years there has been a whole series of writers–some of them
are still writing–whom it is quite impossible to call "good"
by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists
and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick
himself, W.L. George, J.D. Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair,
and–at a lower level than the others but still essentially
similar–A.S.M. Hutchinson.

Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has
naturally varied in quality. I am thinking in each case of one or
two outstanding books: for example, Merrick's CYNTHIA, J.D.
Beresford's A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH, W.L. George's CALIBAN, May
Sinclair's THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED.
In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself
with his imagined characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy
on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people
would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the fact that
intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as
it would be to a music-hall comedian.

Take, for example, Ernest Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED–a
peculiarly sordid and convincing murder story, probably based on
the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal from the fact that
the author only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people
he is writing about, and therefore does not despise them. Perhaps
it even–like Theodore Dreiser's An AMERICAN
TRAGEDY–gains something from the clumsy long-winded manner in
which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no
attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible,
grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A CANDIDATE FOR
TRUTH. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same
ability to take seriously the problems of commonplace people. So
also with CYNTHIA and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The
greater part of what W.L. George wrote was shoddy rubbish, but in
this particular book, based on the career of Northcliffe, he
achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle-class
London life. Parts of this book are probably autobiographical, and
one of the advantages of good bad writers is their lack of shame in
writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane of
the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative
gift may suffer.

The existence of good bad literature–the fact that one can
be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect
simply refuses to take seriously–is a reminder that art is
not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that
could be devised, Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent
man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle
has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to write
in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much as
in poets, the connection between intelligence and creative power is
hard to establish. A good novelist may be a prodigy of
self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl
like Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers
has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as TARR
or SNOOTY BARONET. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one
of these books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of
literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES,
is absent from them.

Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is UNCLE
TOM'S CABIN. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of
preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and
essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the
other. But UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious
and to deal with the real world. How about the frankly escapist
writers, the purveyors of thrills and "light" humour? How about
SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN'S BABIES or KING
SOLOMON'S MINES? All of these are definitely absurd books, books
which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were
hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have
survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is
that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction
from time to time, "light" literature has its appointed place; also
that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which
may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.
There are music-hall songs which are better poems than
three-quarters of the stuff that gets into the anthologies:

Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!

Or again:

Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!

I would far rather have written either of those than, say, "The
Blessed Damozel" or "Love in the Valley". And by the same token I
would back UNCLE TOM'S CABIN to outlive the complete works of
Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly
literary test which would show where the superiority lies.

IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)

When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the
early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G.
Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war
in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until
the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into
captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall
write a serious book." He was placed for the time being under house
arrest, and from his subsequent statements it appears that he was
treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the
neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath or a party".

Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that
Wodehouse had been released from internment and was living at the
Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the public was
astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a
"non-political" nature over the German radio. The full texts of
these broadcasts are not easy to obtain at this date, but Wodehouse
seems to have done five of them between 26th June and 2nd July,
when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast,
on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of
an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the
Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in
Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST an
article which he had written while still in the internment
camp.

The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's
experiences in internment, but they did include a very few comments
on the war. The following are fair samples:

"I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up
any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel
belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go
out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."

"A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the
right idea; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And
I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said
for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to
keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you
are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had
better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe
side."

"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of
being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident
in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure... The
only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of
bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look
the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared
to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal
the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This
offer holds good till Wednesday week."

The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse
was also censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the
phrase "whether Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make
things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits
of some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans
recorded this broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They
seem to have supervised his talks very lightly, and they allowed
him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment but to
remark that "the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that
Britain will eventually win." The general upshot of the talks,
however, was that he had not been ill treated and bore no
malice.

These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There
were questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the
press, and a stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of
them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be
better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse
probably did not realise what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home
Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely violent Postscript by
"Cassandra" of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse of "selling his
country." This postscript made free use of such expressions as
"Quisling" and "worshipping the Fìhrer". The main charge was
that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of
buying himself out of the internment camp.

"Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but
on the whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against
Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous lending libraries
withdrew Wodehouse's books from circulation. Here is a typical news
item:

"Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of
Cassandra, the DAILY MIRROR columnist, Portadown (North Ireland)
Urban District Council banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their
public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast
had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer." (DAILY
MIRROR.)

In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air
and was still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December
1944 there were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put
on trial as a traitor.

There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it
will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar
way. An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not
that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not
merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism.
Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that "Fascist
tendencies" could be detected in his books, and the charge has been
repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of
those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the
events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than
stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could
be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still
under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that
he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him
for their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making
some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by
implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether
England wins or not" did get through. Soon after the interview
Wodehouse told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi
radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special
significance. Flannery comments [ASSIGNMENT TO BERLIN by Harry W.
Flannery.]:

"By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the
best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human
angle...Plack (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near
Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely
without political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse
that in return for being released from the prison camp he write a
series of broadcasts about his experiences; there would be no
censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that
proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse
made fun of the English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote
in any other way, that he was still living in the period about
which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it meant.
Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."

The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack
seems to be merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement
may have been of a much less definite kind, and to judge from the
broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to
keep in touch with his public and–the comedian's ruling
passion–to get a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances
of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery, nor,
probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of
Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would
be unwise to broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that
Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he refers to himself as an
Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He had
contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary
papers. He even used, to Flannery, the phrase, "We're not at war
with Germany."

I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works. It
names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is
as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there
are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the
total–which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read
the whole output of a popular writer who is normally published in
cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly closely since
1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its
peculiar mental atmosphere–an atmosphere which has not, of
course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little alteration
since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery's book which I
quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike
any attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that
Wodehouse "was still living in the period about which he wrote,"
and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made use of him
because he "made fun of the English." The second statement is based
on a misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery's
other comment is quite true and contains in it part of the clue to
Wodehouse's behaviour.

A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's novels
is how long ago the better-known of them were written. We think of
him as in some sense typifying the silliness of the
nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and
characters by which he is best remembered had all made their
appearance before 1925. Psmith first appeared in 1909, having been
foreshadowed by other characters in early school stories. Blandings
Castle, with Baxter and the Earl of Emsworth both in residence, was
introduced in 1915. The Jeeves-Wooster cycle began in 1919, both
Jeeves and Wooster having made brief appearances earlier. Ukridge
appeared in 1924. When one looks through the list of Wodehouse's
books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three fairly well-marked
periods. The first is the school-story period. It includes such
books as THE GOLD BAT, THE POTHUNTERS, etc and has its high-spot in
MIKE (1909). PSMITH IN THE CITY, published in the following year,
belongs in this category, though it is not directly concerned with
school life. The next is the American period. Wodehouse seems to
have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a
while showed signs of BECOMING AMERICANISED IN IDIOM AND OUTLOOK.
SOME OF THE STORIES IN THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET (1917) appear to
have been influenced by 0. Henry, and other books written about
this time contain Americanisms (e.g. "highball" for "whisky and
soda") which an Englishman would not normally use IN PROPRIA
PERSONA. Nevertheless, almost all the books of this
period–PSMITH, JOURNALIST; THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE
INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE; PICCADILLY JIM and various others-depend
for their effect on the CONTRAST between English and American
manners. English characters appear in an American setting, or vice
versa: there is a certain number of purely English stories, but
hardly any purely American ones. The third period might fitly be
called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties
Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social
status of his characters moved upwards accordingly, though the
Ukridge stories form a partial exception. The typical setting is
now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an expensive
golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades
out, cricket and football giving way to golf, and the element of
farce and burlesque becomes more marked. No doubt many of the later
books, such as SUMMER LIGHTNING, are light comedy rather than pure
farce, but the occasional attempts at moral earnestness which can
be found in PSMITH, JOURNALIST; THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE COMING OF
BILL, THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET and some of the school stories, no
longer appear. Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That,
however, is not a very startling metamorphosis, and one of the most
noticeable things about Wodehouse is his LACK of development. Books
like THE GOLD BAT and TALES OF ST AUSTIN'S, written in the opening
years of this century, already have the familiar atmosphere. How
much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can
see from the fact that he continued to write stories of English
life although throughout the sixteen years before his internment he
was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.

MIKE, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged
form, must be one of the best "light" school stories in English.
But though its incidents are largely farcical, it is by no means a
satire on the public school system, and THE GOLD BAT, THE
POTHUNTERS, etc are even less so. Wodehouse was educated at
Dulwich, and then worked in a bank and graduated into novel writing
by way of very cheap journalism. It is clear that for many years he
remained "fixated" on his old school and loathed the unromantic job
and the lower-middle-class surroundings in which he found himself.
In the early stories the "glamour" of public school life (house
matches, fagging, teas round the study fire, etc) is laid on fairly
thick, and the "play the game" code of morals is accepted with not
many reservations. Wrykyn, Wodehouse's imaginary public school, is
a school of a more fashionable type than Dulwich, and one gets the
impression that between THE GOLD BAT (1904) and MIKE (1908) Wrykyn
itself has become more expensive and moved farther from London.
Psychologically the most revealing book of Wodehouse's early period
is PSMITH IN THE CITY. Mike Jackson's father has suddenly lost his
money, and Mike, like Wodehouse himself, is thrust at the age of
about eighteen into an ill-paid subordinate job in a bank. Psmith
is similarly employed, though not from financial necessity. Both
this book and PSMITH, JOURNALIST (1915) are unusual in that they
display a certain amount of political consciousness. Psmith at this
stage chooses to call himself a Socialist-in his mind, and no doubt
in Wodehouse's, this means no more than ignoring class
distinctions-and on one occasion the two boys attend an open-air
meeting on Clapham Common and go home to tea with an elderly
Socialist orator, whose shabby-genteel home is described with some
accuracy. But the most striking feature of the book is Mike's
inability to wean himself from the atmosphere of school. He enters
upon his job without any pretence of enthusiasm, and his main
desire is not, as one might expect, to find a more interesting and
useful job, but simply to be playing cricket. When he has to find
himself lodgings he chooses to settle at Dulwich, because there he
will be near a school and will be able to hear the agreeable sound
of the ball striking against the bat. The climax of the book comes
when Mike gets the chance to play in a county match and simply
walks out of his job in order to do so. The point is that Wodehouse
here sympathises with Mike: indeed he identified himself with him,
for it is clear enough that Mike bears the same relation to
Wodehouse as Julien Sorel to Stendhal. But he created many other
heroes essentially similar. Through the books of this and the next
period there passes a whole series of young men to whom playing
games and "keeping fit" are a sufficient life-work. Wodehouse is
almost incapable of imagining a desirable job. The great thing is
to have money of your own, or, failing that, to find a sinecure.
The hero of SOMETHING FRESH (1915) escapes from low-class
journalism by becoming physical-training instructor to a dyspeptic
millionaire: this is regarded as a step up, morally as well as
financially.

In the books of the third period there is no narcissism and no
serious interludes, but the implied moral and social background has
changed much less than might appear at first sight. If one compares
Bertie Wooster with Mike, or even with the rugger-playing prefects
of the earliest school stories, one sees that the only real
difference between them is that Bertie is richer and lazier. His
ideals would be almost the same as theirs, but he fails to live up
to them. Archie Moffam, in THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE (1921), is a
type intermediate between Bertie and the earlier heroes: he is an
ass, but he is also honest, kind-hearted, athletic and courageous.
From first to last Wodehouse takes the public-school code of
behaviour for granted, with the difference that in his later, more
sophisticated period he prefers to show his characters violating it
or living up to it against their will:

"Bertie! You wouldn't let down a pal?"
"Yes, I would."
"But we were at school together, Bertie."
"I don't care."
"The old school, Bertie, the old school!"
"Oh, well–dash it!"

Bertie, a sluggish Don Quixote, has no wish to tilt at
windmills, but he would hardly think of refusing to do so when
honour calls. Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as
sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain
imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral. Even
Ukridge is a visionary rather than a plain crook. The most immoral,
or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse's characters is Jeeves, who acts
as a foil to Bertie Wooster's comparative high-mindedness and
perhaps symbolises the widespread English belief that intelligence
and unscrupulousness are much the same thing. How closely Wodehouse
sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that
nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke.
This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Not
only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any
compromising situations: the horns-on-the-forehead motif is almost
completely avoided. Most of the full-length books, of course,
contain a "love interest", but it is always at the light-comedy
level: the love affair, with its complications and its idyllic
scenes, goes on and on, but, as the saying goes "nothing happens".
It is significant that Wodehouse, by nature a writer of farces, was
able to collaborate more than once with Ian Hay, a serio-comic
writer and an exponent (VIDE PIP, etc) of the "clean-living
Englishman" tradition at its silliest.

In SOMETHING FRESH Wodehouse had discovered the comic
possibilities of the English aristocracy, and a succession of
ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not actually
contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This
had the rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded,
outside England, as a penetrating satirist of English society.
Hence Flannery's statement that Wodehouse "made fun of the
English," which is the impression he would probably make on a
German or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts
from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist
who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that
Wodehouse HAD gone over to the enemy, which from his own point of
view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find
that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done
useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true
colours. This is a mistake that it would be very difficult for an
English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which
books, especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when
they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear enough that
Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either. On
the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible
all through his work. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to
see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not
seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can
see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de
Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever,
Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy. Indeed, no
one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much.
Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is the same
as his attitude towards the public-school moral code–a mild
facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of
Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and
Bertie Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly
because the servant ought not to be superior to the master. An
American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for
hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe
already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a
decadent aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane,
is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any English reader
would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and
Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes
as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain
problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his
moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious:
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own
upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing
everyone as "Comrade".

But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his
out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really
belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the "knut" of the
pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as "Gilbert the Filbert"
or "Reckless Reggie of the Regent's Palace". The kind of life that
Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the "clubman" or
"man about town", the elegant young man who lounges all the morning
in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his
buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties. It is
significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled
YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who was wearing spats at that date? They
had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But the
traditional "knut", the "Piccadilly Johnny", OUGHT to wear spats,
just as the pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous
writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or
two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a
regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set
foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his
internment. His picture of English society had been formed before
1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring
picture. Nor did he ever become genuinely Americanised. As I have
pointed out, spontaneous Americanisms do occur in the books of the
middle period, but Wodehouse remained English enough to find
American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He loves
to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street
English ("With a hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from
me and went out into the night"), and expressions like "a piece of
cheese" or "bust him on the noggin" lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any
American contacts, and his use of garbled quotations is a common
device of English writers running back to Fielding. As Mr John
Hayward has pointed out, [Note, below] Wodehouse owes a good deal
to his knowledge of English literature and especially of
Shakespeare. His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow
audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving "the kind of
sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in
for its lunch", he is assuming that his readers will know something
of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he admired were
probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F.
Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quick moving
American comic writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon. In his
radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether "the kind
of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the
war", not realising that they were ghosts already. "He was still
living in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery, meaning,
probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the
Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed
round about 1915.

[Note: "P. G. Wodehouse" by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book,
1942.) I believe this is the only full-length critical essay on
Wodehouse. (Author's footnote.)]

If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea
that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine
becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He MAY have been induced to
broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for
release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but
he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to
British interests. As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has
remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the
public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most
unforgivable of all the sins. But how could he fail to grasp that
what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and
would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To
answer this one must take two things into consideration. First,
Wodehouse's complete lack–so far as one can judge from his
printed works–of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk
of "Fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918
tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy
awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not
unfriendly references to Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926)
there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems
to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the
U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely
frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is
about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far as
it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know,
does he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing
circles, indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast
on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would
have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it.
But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a
decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the
British people, one ought to remember, remained anaesthetic to that
struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria,
Czechoslovakia–the long series of crimes and aggressions had
simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as
quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our business." One can
gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary
Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing and
was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there
is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better
informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of
his readers.

The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to
be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its
desperate phase. We forget these things now, but until that time
feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly
any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent
publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as
quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over
the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of
course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated
from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained
on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to
degradation and poverty". By the middle of 1941 the British people
knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were
far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening
year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him
reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in
1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in
this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought
captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made
remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no
attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery
was afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had
done.

But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by
an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look
for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda
warfare.

There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost
certainly significant–the date. Wodehouse was released two or
three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when
the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the
invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out
of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the
German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory
than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat
Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could
polish off Russia quickly–and presumably they expected to do
so–the Americans might never intervene. The release of
Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw
to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United
States, and he was–or so the Germans calculated–popular
with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the
silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the
microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one
way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the
Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies
chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact
that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that
he did not come up to expectations.

But on the British side similar though opposite calculations
were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale
depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for
democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own
efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement
policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process
appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments
were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists
were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley's 1940
broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the DAILY MIRROR, were
good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time.
In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it
was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and
Wodehouse–as "Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his
broadcast–was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who
could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to
the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like
denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his
earnings may happen to be, is not OF the possessing class. Even if
his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked
into a fortune–usually a very temporary fortune–like
the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's
indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to
"expose" a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the
parasites who really mattered.

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to
be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three
or four years later–and more, to let an impression remain
that he acted with conscious treachery–is not excusable. Few
things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the
present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely
the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of
petty rats–police officials, penny-a-lining journalists,
women who have slept with German soldiers–are hunted down
while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the
fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who
were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were
advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched
Wodehouse–just because success and expatriation had allowed
him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age–became the CORPUS
VILE in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time
to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot
by the American authorities, it will have the effect of
establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and
even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the
United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by
being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want
to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical
moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better
worth chasing.

NONSENSE POETRY

In many languages, it is said, there is no nonsense poetry, and
there is not a great deal of it even in English. The bulk of it is
in nursery rhymes and scraps of folk poetry, some of which may not
have been strictly nonsensical at the start, but have become so
because their original application has been forgotten. For example,
the rhyme about Margery Daw:

See-saw, Margery Daw,
Dobbin shall have a new master.
He shall have but a penny a day
Because he can't go any faster.

Or the other version that I learned in Oxfordshire as a little
boy:

See-saw, Margery Daw,
Sold her bed and lay upon straw.
Wasn't she a silly slut
To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?

It may be that there was once a real person called Margery Daw,
and perhaps there was even a Dobbin who somehow came into the
story. When Shakespeare makes Edgar in KING LEAR quote "Pillicock
sat on Pillicock hill", and similar fragments, he is uttering
nonsense, but no doubt these fragments come from forgotten ballads
in which they once had a meaning. The typical scrap of folk poetry
which one quotes almost unconsciously is not exactly nonsense but a
sort of musical comment on some recurring event, such as "One a
penny, two a penny, Hot-Cross buns", or "Polly, put the kettle on,
we'll all have tea". Some of these seemingly frivolous rhymes
actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard
wisdom of the peasant. For instance:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or
mine.

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious,
poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless
refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common. This gives a
special position to Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just
been edited by Mr R.L. Megroz, who was also responsible for the
Penguin edition a year or two before the war. Lear was one of the
first writers to deal in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and
made-up words, without any satirical purpose. His poems are not all
of them equally nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a
perversion of logic, but they are all alike in that their
underlying feeling is sad and not bitter. They express a kind of
amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and
absurd. Lear could fairly be called the originator of the limerick,
though verses in almost the same metrical form are to be found in
earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered a weakness in his
limericks–that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same in the
first and last lines–is part of their charm. The very slight
change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be
spoiled if there were some striking surprise. For example:

There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear's have
been both printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he
is really seen at his best in certain longer poems, such as "The
Owl and the Pussy-Cat" or "The Courtship of the
Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò":

On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an
inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly
enough, that this may refer to some incident in Lear's own life. He
never married, and it is easy to guess that there was something
seriously wrong in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find
all kinds of significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of
certain made-up words such as "runcible". His health was bad, and
as he was the youngest of twenty-one children in a poor family, he
must have known anxiety and hardship in very early life. It is
clear that he was unhappy and by nature solitary, in spite of
having good friends.

Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear's fantasies as a sort of
assertion of freedom, has pointed out that the "They" of the
limericks represent common sense, legality and the duller virtues
generally. "They" are the realists, the practical men, the sober
citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing
anything worth doing. For instance:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, "It's absurd
To encourage this bird!"
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is
exactly the kind of thing that "They" would do. Herbert Read has
also praised Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of
Lewis Carroll, as being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that
I find Lear funniest when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of
burlesque or perverted logic makes its appearance. When he gives
his fancy free play, as in his imaginary names, or in things like
"Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery", he can be silly and
tiresome. "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" is haunted by the ghost of
logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that makes it
funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the
Bristol Channel:

And all the Sailors and Admirals cried, When they saw him
nearing the further side– "He has gone to fish, for his Aunt
Jobiska's Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!"

The thing that is funny here is the burlesque touch, the
Admirals. What is arbitrary–the word "runcible", and the
cat's crimson whiskers–is merely rather embarrassing. While
the Pobble was in the water some unidentified creatures came and
ate his toes off, and when he got home his aunt remarked:

"It's a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes,"

which once again is funny because it has a meaning, and one
might even say a political significance. For the whole theory of
authoritarian governments is summed up in the statement that
Pobbles were happier without their toes. So also with the
well-known limerick:

There was an Old Person of Basing,
Whose presence of mind was amazing;
He purchased a steed,
Which he rode at full speed,
And escaped from the people of Basing.

It is not quite arbitrary. The funniness is in the gentle
implied criticism of the people of Basing, who once again are
"They", the respectable ones, the right-thinking, art-hating
majority.

The writer closest to Lear among his contemporaries was Lewis
Carroll, who, however, was less essentially fantastic–and, in
my opinion, funnier. Since then, as Mr Megroz points out in his
Introduction, Lear's influence has been considerable, but it is
hard to believe that it has been altogether good. The silly
whimsiness of present-day children's books could perhaps be partly
traced back to him. At any rate, the idea of deliberately setting
out to write nonsense, though it came off in Lear's case, is a
doubtful one. Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced
gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by
individuals. As a comic draughtsman, on the other hand, Lear's
influence must have been beneficial. James Thurber, for instance,
must surely owe something to Lear, directly or indirectly.

NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word LONGEUR,
and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have
the WORD, we have the THING in considerable profusion. In the same
way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it
affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet
been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen
the word 'nationalism', but it will be seen in a moment that I am
not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the
emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what
is called a nation–that is, a single race or a geographical
area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work
in a merely negative sense, AGAINST something or other and without
the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that
human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks
of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently
labelled 'good' or 'bad'.[See note, below] But secondly–and
this is much more important–I mean the habit of identifying
oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good
and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its
interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both
words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is
liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between
them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By
'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular
way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has
no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature
defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the
other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding
purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more
prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which
he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

[Note: Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church
or the proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and
often referred to as 'she'. Patently absurd remarks such as
'Germany is naturally treacherous' are to be found in any newspaper
one opens and reckless generalization about national character
('The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat' or 'Every Englishman is a
hypocrite') are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these
generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making
them persists, and people of professedly international outlook,
e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them. (Author's
footnote)]

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and
identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other
countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon
like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of
us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat
what I said above, that I am only using the word 'nationalism' for
lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am
using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as
Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism
and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government
or a country, still less to ONE'S OWN country, and it is not even
strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually
exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom,
the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of
passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be
seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them
that would be universally accepted.

It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling
can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who
have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a
corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the
implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism
becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks
solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a
positive or a negative nationalist–that is, he may use his
mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating–but at any
rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and
humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as
the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event
that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on
the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally,
it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of
success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply
ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked
his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest, and is
able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly
against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by
self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant
dishonesty, but he is also–since he is conscious of serving
something bigger than himself–unshakeably certain of being in
the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will
be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread
among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than
among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about
contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by
considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to
them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one
might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies,
the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the
defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a
reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In
practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made,
because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question
would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would
therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America
as the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for
arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole
strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest
answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject
involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any
case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of
political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that
out of al the 'experts' of all the schools, there was not a single
one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German
Pact of 1939.[Note 1, below] And when news of the Pact broke, the
most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and
predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately,
being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities
but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or
weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can
survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do
not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the
stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.[Note 2, below] And
aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often
corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult
for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a
Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a
temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with
must be a bad book from a LITERARY point of view. People of
strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand
without being conscious of dishonesty.

[Note 1: A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter
Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they
expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be
permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever
colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact.(Author's
footnote)]

[Note 2: The military commentators of the popular press can
mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian pro-blimp or
anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable,
or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months,
have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always
saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two
military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain
Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches
that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that
the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not
prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the
same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles
is that both of them are at odds with the War Office. (Author's
footnote)]

In England, if one simply considers the number of people
involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is
old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still
widespread, and much more so than most observers would have
believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned
chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom
jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead,
though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the
intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of
nationalism is Communism–using this word in a very loose
sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but 'fellow
travellers' and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose
here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and
feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and advance Russian
interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England
today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But
many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by
noticing the points of resemblance between different and even
seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the
matter into perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely
corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its
most outstanding exponent–though he was perhaps an extreme
case rather than a typical one–was G. K. Chesterton.
Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to
suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the
cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or
so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless
repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as
simple and boring as 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians.' Every book
that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond
the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the
Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of
this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be
translated into terms of national prestige and military power,
which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries,
especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his
picture of it–as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly
singing the MARSEILLAISE over glasses of red wine–had about
as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN CHOW has to everyday life
in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation
of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he
maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but
a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war.
Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint
Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist
tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found
in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic
rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army
been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army,
he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a
Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and
according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he
looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his
principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost
mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him
from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative
government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had
struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had
made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton
ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of
coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen.
His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent
his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic
loyalties were involved.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political
Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there
are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism,
Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an
oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the
same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules
that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal
characteristics of nationalist thought:

OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks,
talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own
power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist
to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or
any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with
uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort.
If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India,
he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military
power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport,
structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants,
and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show
great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of
flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different
countries are named.[Note, below] Nomenclature plays a very
important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won
their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually
change their names, and any country or other unit round which
strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of
them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish
Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different
degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. 'Patriots'
for Franco-supporters, or 'Loyalists' for Government-supporters)
were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the
which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All
nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the
detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this
struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects.
Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know
it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and
Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish
nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and
socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade
against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression
of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic–a belief which
probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political
enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting
galleries.

[Note: Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because
'Anglo-American' is the form of combination for these two words. It
has been proposed to submit 'Americo-British'.(Author's
footnote)]

INSTABILITY. The intensity with which they are held does not
prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin
with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are
fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that
great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements,
do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes
they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from
peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are
Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare,
Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an
Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred
years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among
literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was
to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and
in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly
interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A
country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may
suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may
take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H.
G. Wells's OUTLINE OF HISTORY, and others of his writings about
that time, one finds the United States praised almost as
extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within
a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility.
The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even
days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In
continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from
among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within
the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his
state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be
imaginary.

But for an intellectual, transference has an important function
which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with
Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much MORE
nationalistic–more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more
dishonest–that he could ever be on behalf of his native
country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees
the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the
Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one
realises that this is only possible because some kind of
dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is
unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very
deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion–that is,
the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is
aware–will not allow him to do so. Most of the people
surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the
same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case
he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to
hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist
outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is
natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can
wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he
believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the
Empire, the Union Jack–all the overthrown idols can reappear
under different names, and because they are not recognised for what
they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred
nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining
salvation without altering one's conduct.

INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not
seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory
will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India
with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or
bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and
there is almost no kind of outrage–torture, the use of
hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without
trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians–which
does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our'
side. The Liberal NEWS CHRONICLE published, as an example of
shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans,
and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost
exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the
Russians.[Note, below] It is the same with historical events.
History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things
as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits
of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was
given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the
heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or
Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become
morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were
done in the 'right' cause. If one looks back over the past quarter
of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when
atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the
world; and yet in not one single case were these
atrocities–in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico,
Amritsar, Smyrna–believed in and disapproved of by the
English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were
reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided
according to political predilection.

[Note: The NEWS CHRONICLE advised its readers to visit the news
film at which the entire execution could be witnessed, with
close-ups. The STAR published with seeming approval photographs of
nearly naked female collaborationists being baited by the Paris
mob. These photographs had a marked resemblance to the Nazi
photographs of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob.(Author's
footnote)]

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities
committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not
even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers
of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and
Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German
concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly
aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge
events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of
millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the
majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard
almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews
during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast
crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought
there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown.
A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed
aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the
other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be
admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be
altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which
things happen as they should–in which, for example, the
Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed
in 1918–and he will transfer fragments of this world to the
history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing
of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are
suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context
and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt
ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately
denied [Note, below]. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of
Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the
heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought
him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling
of the Communists 'didn't count', or perhaps had not happened. The
primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary
opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with
part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the
past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been
committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable
part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the
people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that
their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that
one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.

[Note: En example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being
effaced as quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian
correspondent informs me that mention of the Pact is already being
omitted from Russian year-books which table recent political
events.(Author's note)]

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off
of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and
harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a
genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is
impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of
millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The
calamities that are constantly being reported–battles,
massacres, famines, revolutions–tend to inspire in the
average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying
the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened,
and one is always presented with totally different interpretations
from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the
Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens
in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably
the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set
forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be
forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion.
The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it
easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite
proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently
denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory,
defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in
what happens in the real world. What he wants is to FEEL that his
own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more
easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the
facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy
is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely
inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to
have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from
schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and
conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are
common to all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify
those forms, but obviously this cannot be done comprehensively.
Nationalism is an enormous subject. The world is tormented by
innumerable delusions and hatreds which cut across one another in
an extremely complex way, and some of the most sinister of them
have not yet impinged on the European consciousness. In this essay
I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs among the English
intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary English people,
it is unmixed with patriotism and therefore can be studied pure.
Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now flourishing among
English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be needed. It
is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred, and
Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one
category:

POSITIVE NATIONALISM

(i) NEO-TORYISM. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A.P.
Herbert, G.M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the
Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as the NEW ENGLISH
REVIEW and THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER. The real motive force
of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and
differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to
recognise that British power and influence have declined. Even
those who are realistic enough to see that Britain's military
position is not what it was, tend to claim that 'English ideas'
(usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories
are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American.
The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be
gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes
ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of
disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe
who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common
figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt,
Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a
psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot,
Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

(ii) CELTIC NATIONALISM. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism
have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English
orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war
while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the
lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian
and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as
anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future
greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of
racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the
Saxon–simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish,
etc.–but the usual power hunger is there under the surface.
One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales
could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British
protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought
are Hugh McDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even
of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of
nationalism.

(iii) ZIONISM. This the unusual characteristics of a nationalist
movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent
and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not
Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively
among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather
incongruous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the
Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All
English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of
disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic
loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to
be found among Gentiles.

TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM

(i) COMMUNISM.

(ii) POLITICAL CATHOLICISM.

(iii) COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude
towards 'natives' has been much weakened in England, and various
pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white
race have been abandoned.[Note, below] Among the intelligentsia,
colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a
belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now
increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting
more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact
with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those
who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and
imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English
intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races
are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem
to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic
attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the
belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large
underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

[Note: A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until
recently it was believed that the white races were much more liable
to sunstroke that the coloured, and that a white man could not
safely walk about in tropical sunshine without a pith helmet. There
was no evidence whatever for this theory, but it served the purpose
of accentuating the difference between 'natives' and Europeans.
During the war the theory was quietly dropped and whole armies
manoeuvred in the tropics without pith helmets. So long as the
sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear to
have believed in it as firmly as laymen.(Author's footnote)]

(iv) CLASS FEELING. Among upper-class and middle-class
intellectuals, only in the transposed form–i.e. as a belief
in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the
intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming.
Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious
theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist
with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

(v) PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure
religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the
taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that
point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real
though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy
and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually
boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if
one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual
pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express
impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against
Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule
condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of
western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed
for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist
propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is
not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in
their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds
with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean
that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the
type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is
violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists,
faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had
to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there
appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the
Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have
written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of
Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as
it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly
inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The
mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could
easily be retransferred.

NEGATIVE NATIONALISM

(i) ANGLOPHOBIA. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and
mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory,
but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was
manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted
long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win.
Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when
the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable
unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the
number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English
left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the
Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help
getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated,
and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia,
or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many
intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by
Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is
quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is
always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the
pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

(ii) ANTI-SEMITISM. There is little evidence about this at
present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for
any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors.
Anyone educated enough to have heard the word 'antisemitism' claims
as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are
carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually
antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals,
and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it.
People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is
sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend
to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of
Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national
morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political
Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least
intermittently.

(iii) TROTSKYISM. This word is used so loosely as to include
Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here
to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the
Stalin régime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure
pamphlets or in papers like the SOCIALIST APPEAL than in the works
of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although
in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is
able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into
an organised movement with a petty fuerher of its own, its
inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is AGAINST
Stalin just as the Communist is FOR him, and, like the majority of
Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to
feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In
each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject,
the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on
probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a
persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against
them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false,
creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally
superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much
difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are
ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of
the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party
by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into
Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally
often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that
I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted
assumptions and have left out of account the existence of
ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this
essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in
all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily
occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is
important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture
which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right
to assume that EVERYONE, or even every intellectual, is infected by
nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited.
An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to
be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods,
only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when
he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a
nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from
non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism,
even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, 'the nationalist does this' or
'the nationalist does that', using for purposes of illustration the
extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas
in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for
power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not
worth the powder and shot. In real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt,
Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all
the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their
intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is
not interesting, and the fact that no nationalist of the more
bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after
a lapse of years has a certain deodorising effect. But when one has
admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there
are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of their
desires, the fact does remain that the pressing
problems–India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the
Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what
have you–cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a
reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each of them
simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over
again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we
do not realise that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments.
Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden
on–and it may be corn whose very existence has been
unsuspected hitherto–and the most fair-minded and
sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious
partisan, anxious only to 'score' over his adversary and
indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors
he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an opponent of
the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the British
communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of
more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded
that Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted 'Cad!' Very few
people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by
a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly
criticised by an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the
Spanish Armada, will all react in much the same way. One prod to
the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can
vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be
denied.

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty
or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are
inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types
of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is
impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his
secret thoughts:

BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced
power and prestige.

COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America,
Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of
British protection.

TROTSKYIST: The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian
masses.

PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because
others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not
happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case
they are also INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false
theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the
astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It
is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more
wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and
that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average
intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was
lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942,
that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had
conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making
no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his
hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that
British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that
can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this
kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the
American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans
but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the
intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could
be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the
MOI issued 'as background' a warning that Russia might be expected
to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded
every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians
were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several
million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The
point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship
are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have
pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged
also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned
when 'our' side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the
crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same
crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits
in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified–still one
cannot FEEL that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity
ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big
a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the
forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a
distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in
the external world, and that its worst follies have been made
possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If
one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led
into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can
be plausibly argued, for instance–it is even possibly
true–that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism,
that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organised
religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be
argued that NO unbiased outlook is possible, that ALL creeds and
causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is
often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether.
I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world
no one describable as an intellectual CAN keep out of politics in
the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in
politics–using the word in a wide sense–and that one
must have preferences: that is, one must recognise that some causes
are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by
equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that
I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us,
whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of
them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to
struggle against them, and that this is essentially a MORAL effort.
It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is,
what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance
for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are
jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if
you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling
class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking
thought. But you can at least recognise that you have them, and
prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The
emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even
necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side
with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a MORAL
effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive
at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are
prepared to make it.

REVENGE IS SOUR (1945)

Whenever I read phrases like 'war guilt trials', 'punishment of
war criminals' and so forth, there comes back into my mind the
memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-war camp in South
Germany, earlier this year.

Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp
by a little Viennese Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the
American army which deals with the interrogation of prisoners. He
was an alert, fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of about
twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the
average American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him. The
camp was on an airfield, and, after we had been round the cages,
our guide led us to a hangar where various prisoners who were in a
different category from the others were being 'screened'.

Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a
row on the concrete floor. These, it was explained, were S.S.
officers who had been segregated from the other prisoners. Among
them was a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm
across his face and apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly
deformed feet. The two of them were quite symmetrical, but they
were clubbed out into an extraordinary globular shape which made
them more like a horse's hoof than anything human. As we approached
the group, the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a
state of excitement.

'That's the real swine!' he said, and suddenly he lashed out
with his heavy army boot and caught the prostrate man a fearful
kick right on the bulge of one of his deformed feet.

'Get up, you swine!' he shouted as the man started out of sleep,
and then repeated something of the kind in German. The prisoner
scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily to attention. With the
same air of working himself up into a fury–indeed he was
almost dancing up and down as he spoke–the Jew told us the
prisoner's history. He was a 'real' Nazi: his party number
indicated that he had been a member since the very early days, and
he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political
branch of the S.S. It could be taken as quite certain that he had
had charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures
and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been
fighting against during the past five years.

Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the
scrubby, unfed, unshaven look that a newly captured man generally
has, he was a disgusting specimen. But he did not look brutal or in
any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way,
intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful
spectacles. He could have been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor
ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have seen very similar
people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading
Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was mentally
unbalanced–indeed, only doubtfully sane, though at this
moment sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened of getting
another kick. And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his
history could have been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi
torturer of one's imagination, the monstrous figure against whom
one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this pitiful
wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some
kind of psychological treatment.

Later, there were further humiliations. Another S.S. officer, a
large brawny man, was ordered to strip to the waist and show the
blood group number tattooed on his under-arm; another was forced to
explain to us how he had lied about being a member of the S.S. and
attempted to pass himself off as an ordinary soldier of the
Wehrmacht. I wondered whether the Jew was getting any real kick out
of this new-found power that he was exercising. I concluded that he
wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely–like a man
in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist
traipsing round a picture gallery–TELLING himself that he was
enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days
he was helpless.

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his
own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man
may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been
murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very
tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler
régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in
Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and
punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no
such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit
when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as
the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of
seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing
becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said
that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman
drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, 'Those
are for my five sons!' It is the kind of story that the newspapers
make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she
got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed
years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get
close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a
corpse.

In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for
the monstrous peace settlement now being forced on Germany, it is
because of a failure to see in advance that punishing an enemy
brings no satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion
of all Germans from East Prussia–crimes which in some cases
we could not prevent but might at least have protested
against–because the Germans had angered and frightened us,
and therefore we were certain that when they were down we should
feel no pity for them. We persist in these policies, or let others
persist in them on our behalf, because of a vague feeling that,
having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.
Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this
country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of
occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their
'atrocities' from one source or another, take a keen interest in
the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings. If you asked the
average man what crime Goering, Ribbentrop, and the rest are to be
charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you. Somehow the
punishment of these monsters ceases to seem attractive when it
becomes possible: indeed, once under lock and key, they almost
cease to be monsters.

Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident
before one can discover the real state of one's feelings. Here is
another memory from Germany. A few hours after Stuttgart was
captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself
entered the town, which was still in some disorder. The Belgian had
been broadcasting throughout the war for the European Service of
the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians, he had a very
much tougher attitude towards 'the Boche' than an Englishman or an
American would have. All the main bridges into town had been blown
up, and we had to enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had
evidently mad efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was lying
supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his
breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming
everywhere.

The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well
over the bridge he confided to me that this was the first time he
had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty five years old, and
for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio. For
several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what
it had been earlier. He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked
town and the humiliation the Germans were undergoing, and even on
one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of
looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had
brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A week
earlier he would probably have been scandalized at the idea of
giving coffee to a 'Boche'. But his feelings, he told me, had
undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the
bridge: it had suddenly brought home to him the meaning of war. And
yet, if we had happened to enter the town by another route, he
might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of
the–perhaps–twenty million that the war has
produced.

THE SPORTING SPIRIT

Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to
an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people
were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is,
that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a
visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it
could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at
least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At
the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British
and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee.
The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a
free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy,
typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the
Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the
Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And
did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing
an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions
according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone,
however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious
passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of
the russophile NEWS CHRONICLE took the anti-Russian line and
maintained that Arsenal was NOT an all-England team. No doubt the
controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of
history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos' tour, in so far
as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity
on both sides.

And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear
people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and
that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another
at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on
the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples
(the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting
contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general
principles.

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You
play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your
utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no
feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play
simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of
prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit
will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts
are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match
knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic
warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the
players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the
spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over
these absurd contests, and seriously believe–at any rate for
short periods–that running, jumping and kicking a ball are
tests of national virtue.

Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than
strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy
over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian
team that visited England in 1921. Football, a game in which
everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which
seems unfair to foreigners, is far worse. Worst of all is boxing.
One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between
white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience. But a boxing
audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in
particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not allow them
to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago, when
Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I
was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep
the women out.

In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even
fiercer passions are aroused in young countries where games playing
and nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like
India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong
cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In
Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the
police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a
critical moment. The first big football match that was played in
Spain about fifteen years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As
soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of
playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People
want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they
forget that victory gained through cheating or through the
intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators
don't intervene physically they try to influence the game by
cheering their own side and "rattling" opposing players with boos
and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is
bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all
rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words
it is war minus the shooting.

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the
football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in
bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and
why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play
are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken
very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even
in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the
later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as
the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply
a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States,
games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of
attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the
infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently
combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest.
There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with
the rise of nationalism–that is, with the lunatic modern
habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing
everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games
are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average
human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does
not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community
a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by
walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and
by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing,
cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must
indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's
physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken
seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in
Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and
probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not
mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in
the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a
series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and
Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and
Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000
spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the
main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I
think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced
nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a
team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle
against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides
that whichever nation is defeated will "lose face".

I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the
Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so,
then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and
cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite
enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them
by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the
roars of infuriated spectators.

YOU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB (1945)

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it
within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much
discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have
published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man,
of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much
reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb 'ought to be put
under international control.' But curiously little has been said,
at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent
interest to all of us, namely: 'How difficult are these things to
manufacture?'

Such information as we–that is, the big
public–possess on this subject has come to us in a rather
indirect way, apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand
over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb
was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that
splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and
that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be
within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour
went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation
to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been
abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small
states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over
the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it
appears from President Truman's remarks, and various comments that
have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive
and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort,
such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of
making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean
that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing
history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent
for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely
the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the
discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the
bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I
have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the
following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which
the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to
be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and
simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks,
battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons,
while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently
democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger,
while a simple weapon–so long as there is no answer to
it–gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination
was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the
flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the
musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so
simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination
of qualities made possible the success of the American and French
revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious
business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the
breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but
it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was
cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most
backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or
another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans–even
Tibetans–could put up a fight for their independence,
sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in
military technique has favoured the State as against the
individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward
one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939,
there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand
scale, and now there are only three–ultimately, perhaps, only
two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by
a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse
it is the discovery of a weapon–or, to put it more broadly,
of a method of fighting–not dependent on huge concentrations
of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet
possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand,
the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it
within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or
three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which
millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the
world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this
means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the
machine civilisation. But suppose–and really this the
likeliest development–that the surviving great nations make a
tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another?
Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who
are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were
before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in
still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and
oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION it seemed
probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European
end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany
and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan
would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it
does not affect the main argument. For Burnham's geographical
picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and
more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into
three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact
with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or
another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the
frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for
some years, and the third of the three super-states–East
Asia, dominated by China–is still potential rather than
actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific
discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had 'abolished frontiers';
actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon
that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was
once expected to promote international understanding and
co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one
nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by
robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt,
and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis
of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are
likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is
difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and
unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have
been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with
his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species
to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will
find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the
world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards
anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading
not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as
the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been
much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological
implications–that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of
beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a
state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a permanent state of
'cold war' with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and
easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well
have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other
hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the
highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is
a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship,
it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of
prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace'.

A GOOD WORD FOR THE VICAR OF BRAY

Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church
of which the celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent.
(Actually it is a few miles from Bray, but perhaps at that time the
two livings were one.) In the churchyard there stands a magnificent
yew tree which, according to a notice at its foot, was planted by
no less a person than the Vicar of Bray himself. And it struck me
at the time as curious that such a man should have left such a
relic behind him.

The Vicar of Bray, though he was well equipped to be a
leader-writer on THE TIMES, could hardly be described as an
admirable character. Yet, after this lapse of time, all that is
left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree, which has rested
the eyes of generation after generation and must surely have
outweighed any bad effects which he produced by his political
quislingism.

Thibaw, the last King of Burma, was also far from being a good
man. He was a drunkard, he had five hundred wives–he seems to
have kept them chiefly for show, however–and when he came to
the throne his first act was to decapitate seventy or eighty of his
brothers. Yet he did posterity a good turn by planting the dusty
streets of Mandalay with tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade
until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942.

The poet, James Shirley, seems to have generalised too freely
when he said that "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and
blossom in their dust". Sometimes the actions of the unjust make
quite a good showing after the appropriate lapse of time. When I
saw the Vicar of Bray's yew tree it reminded me of something, and
afterwards I got hold of a book of selections from the writings of
John Aubrey and reread a pastoral poem which must have been written
some time in the first half of the seventeenth century, and which
was inspired by a certain Mrs Overall.

Mrs Overall was the wife of a Dean and was extensively
unfaithful to him. According to Aubrey she "could scarcely denie
any one", and she had "the loveliest Eies that were ever seen, but
wondrous wanton". The poem (the "shepherd swaine" seems to have
been somebody called Sir John Selby) starts off:

Downe lay the Shepherd Swaine
So sober and demure
Wishing for his wench againe
So bonny and so pure
With his head on hillock lowe
And his arms akimboe
And all was for the losse of his
Hye nonny nonny noe...
Sweet she was, as kind a love
As ever fetter'd Swaine;
Never such a daynty one
Shall man enjoy again.
Sett a thousand on a rowe
I forbid that any showe
Ever the like of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

As the poem proceeds through another six verses, the refrain
"Hye nonny nonny noe" takes on an unmistakably obscene meaning, but
it ends with the exquisite stanza:

But gone she is the prettiest lasse
That ever trod on plaine.
What ever hath betide of her
Blame not the Shepherd Swaine.
For why? She was her owne Foe,
And gave herself the overthrowe
By being so franke of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

Mrs Overall was no more an exemplary character than the Vicar of
Bray, though a more attractive one. Yet in the end all that remains
of her is a poem which still gives pleasure to many people, though
for some reason it never gets into the anthologies. The suffering
which she presumably caused, and the misery and futility in which
her own life must have ended, have been transformed into a sort of
lingering fragrance like the smell of tobacco-plants on a summer
evening.

But to come back to trees. The planting of a tree, especially
one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make
to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if
the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any
of your other actions, good or evil. A year or two ago I wrote a
few paragraphs in TRIBUNE about some sixpenny rambler roses from
Woolworth's which I had planted before the war. This brought me an
indignant letter from a reader who said that roses are bourgeois,
but I still think that my sixpence was better spent than if it had
gone on cigarettes or even on one of the excellent Fabian Research
Pamphlets.

Recently, I spent a day at the cottage where I used to live, and
noted with a pleased surprise–to be exact, it was a feeling
of having done good unconsciously–the progress of the things
I had planted nearly ten years ago. I think it is worth recording
what some of them cost, just to show what you can do with a few
shillings if you invest them in something that grows.

First of all there were the two ramblers from Woolworth's, and
three polyantha roses, all at sixpence each. Then there were two
bush roses which were part of a job lot from a nursery garden. This
job lot consisted of six fruit trees, three rose bushes and two
gooseberry bushes, all for ten shillings. One of the fruit trees
and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing.
The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry
bushes, all for twelve and sixpence. These plants have not entailed
much work, and have had nothing spent on them beyond the original
amount. They never even received any manure, except what I
occasionally collected in a bucket when one of the farm horses
happened to have halted outside the gate.

Between them, in nine years, those seven rose bushes will have
given what would add up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty months
of bloom. The fruit trees, which were mere saplings when I put them
in, are now just about getting in their stride. Last week one them,
a plum, was a mass of blossom, and the apples looked as if they
were going to do fairly well. What had originally been the weakling
of the family, a Cox's Orange Pippin–it would hardly have
been included in the job lot if it had been a good plant–had
grown into a sturdy tree with plenty of fruit spurs on it. I
maintain that it was a public-spirited action to plant that Cox,
for these trees do not fruit quickly and I did not expect to stay
there long. I never had an apple off it myself, but it looks as if
someone else will have quite a lot. By their fruits ye shall know
them, and the Cox's Orange Pippin is a good fruit to be known by.
Yet I did not plant it with the conscious intention of doing
anybody a good turn. I just saw the job lot going cheap and stuck
the things into the ground without much preparation.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some
time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does
plant them nowadays–when you see a walnut it is almost
invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it
for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
Nor does anybody plant a quince, a mulberry or a medlar. But these
are garden trees which you can only be expected to plant if you
have a patch of ground of your own. On the other hand, in any hedge
or in any piece of waste ground you happen to be walking through,
you can do something to remedy the appalling massacre of trees,
especially oaks, ashes, elms and beeches, which has happened during
the war years.

Even an apple tree is liable to live for about 100 years, so
that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into
the twenty-first century. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds
of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of
people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not
suggesting that one can discharge all one's obligations towards
society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it
might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act,
to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate
season, push an acorn into the ground.

And, if even one in twenty of them came to maturity, you might
do quite a lot of harm in your lifetime, and still, like the Vicar
of Bray, end up as a public benefactor after all.

A NICE CUP OF TEA (1946)

If you look up 'tea' in the first cookery book that comes to
hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you
will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling
on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays
of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and
New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the
subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I
find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of
them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four
others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules,
every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea
has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays–it is
economical, and one can drink it without milk–but there is
not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more
optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting
phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea. Secondly,
tea should be made in small quantities–that is, in a teapot.
Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a
cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made
of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce
inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a
pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad. Thirdly, the pot
should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on
the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if
you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons
would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea
that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that
one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea
lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little
stronger with each year that passes–a fact which is
recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers,
muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries
teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to
catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually
one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill
effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses
properly. Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not
the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the
moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame
while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water
that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed
that it makes any difference. Seventhly, after making the tea, one
should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards
allowing the leaves to settle. Eighthly, one should drink out of a
good breakfast cup–that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not
the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the
other kind one's tea is always half cold–before one has well
started on it. Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk
before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a
sickly taste. Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This
is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every
family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the
subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong
arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable.
This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one
pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is
liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way
round.

Lastly, tea–unless one is drinking it in the Russian
style–should be drunk WITHOUT SUGAR. I know very well that I
am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true
tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar
in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea
is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you
sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely
tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by
dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself,
that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and
they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I
would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and
it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by
sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in
connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how
subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the
mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it
considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and
much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tea leaves, such
as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding
rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying
attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that
is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of
one's ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces,
properly handled, ought to represent.

BOOKS VS. CIGARETTES

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was
fire watching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about
his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he
asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he
got was: "You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half
the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence!
Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book." These,
he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on
a day trip to Blackpool.

This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an
expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person is so
widespread that it deserves some detailed examination. Exactly what
reading costs, reckoned in terms of pence per hour, is difficult to
estimate, but I have made a start by inventorying my own books and
adding up their total price. After allowing for various other
expenses, I can make a fairly good guess at my expenditure over the
last fifteen years.

The books that I have counted and priced are the ones I have
here, in my flat. I have about an equal number stored in another
place, so that I shall double the final figure in order to arrive
at the complete amount. I have not counted oddments such as proof
copies, defaced volumes, cheap paper-covered editions, pamphlets,
or magazines, unless bound up into book form. Nor have I counted
the kind of junky books-old school text-books and so
forth–that accumulate in the bottoms of cupboards. I have
counted only those books which I have acquired voluntarily, or else
would have acquired voluntarily, and which I intend to keep. In
this category I find that I have 442 books, acquired in the
following ways:

Bought (mostly second-hand) 251
Given to me or bought with book tokens 33
Review copies and complimentary copies 143
Borrowed and not returned 10
Temporarily on loan 5
Total 442

Now as to the method of pricing. Those books that I have bought
I have listed at their full price, as closely as I can determine
it. I have also listed at their full price the books that have been
given to me, and those that I have temporarily borrowed, or
borrowed and kept. This is because book-giving, book-borrowing and
book stealing more or less even out. I possess books that do not
strictly speaking belong to me, but many other people also have
books of mine: so that the books I have not paid for can be taken
as balancing others which I have paid for but no longer possess. On
the other hand I have listed the review and complimentary copies at
half-price. That is about what I would have paid for them
second-hand, and they are mostly books that I would only have
bought second-hand, if at all. For the prices I have sometimes had
to rely on guesswork, but my figures will not be far out. The costs
were as follows:

Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems
that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165
15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years–actually
more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it
fifteen years. This works out at £11 1s. a year, but there
are other charges that must be added in order to estimate my full
reading expenses. The biggest will be for newspapers and
periodicals, and for this I think £8 a year would be a
reasonable figure. Eight pounds a year covers the cost of two daily
papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and
one or two monthly magazines. This brings the figure up to
£19 1s., but to arrive at the grand total one has to make a
guess. Obviously one often spends money on books without afterwards
having anything to show for it. There are library subscriptions,
and there are also the books, chiefly Penguins and other cheap
editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away. However, on
the basis of my other figures, it looks as though £6 a year
would be quite enough to add for expenditure of this kind. So my
total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the
neighbourhood of £25 a year.

Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot until you begin to
measure it against other kinds of expenditure. It is nearly 9s. 9d.
a week, and at present 9s. 9d. is the equivalent of about 83
cigarettes (Players): even before the war it would have bought you
less than 200 cigarettes. With prices as they now are, I am
spending far more on tobacco than I do on books. I smoke six ounces
a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year.
Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d. an ounce, I was
spending over £10 a year on it: and if I also averaged a pint
of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost
me close on £20 a year. This was probably not much above the
national average. In 1938 the people of this country spent nearly
£10 per head per annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20
per cent of the population were children under fifteen and another
40 per cent were women, so that the average smoker and drinker must
have been spending much more than £10. In 1944, the annual
expenditure per head on these items was no less than £23.
Allow for the women and children as before, and £40 is a
reasonable individual figure. Forty pounds a year would just about
pay for a packet of Woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six
days a week–not a magnificent allowance. Of course, all
prices are now inflated, including the price of books: still, it
looks as though the cost of reading, even if you buy books instead
of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals,
does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and
drinking.

It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price
of books and the value one gets out of them. "Books" includes
novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological
treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to
one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand.
You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may
spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments
over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over
and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's
mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips
into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single
sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money,
may be the same in each case. But if one regards reading simply as
a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible to
make a rough estimate of what it costs. If you read nothing but
novels and "light" literature, and bought every book that you read,
you would be spending-allowing eight shillings as the price of a
book, and four hours as the time spent in reading it-two shillings
an hour. This is about what it costs to sit in one of the more
expensive seats in the cinema. If you concentrated on more serious
books, and still bought everything that you read, your expenses
would be about the same. The books would cost more but they would
take longer to read. In either case you would still possess the
books after you had read them, and they would be saleable at about
a third of their purchase price. If you bought only second-hand
books, your reading expenses would, of course, be much less:
perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate. And on the other
hand if you don't buy books, but merely borrow them from the
lending library, reading costs you round about a halfpenny an hour:
if you borrow them from the public library, it costs you next door
to nothing.

I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper
recreations: after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest.
Meanwhile, what is the actual amount that the British public spends
on books? I cannot discover any figures, though no doubt they
exist. But I do know that before the war this country was
publishing annually about 15,000 books, which included reprints and
school books. If as many as 10,000 copies of each book were
sold–and even allowing for the school books, this is probably
a high estimate-the average person was only buying, directly or
indirectly, about three books a year. These three books taken
together might cost £1, or probably less.

These figures are guesswork, and I should be interested if
someone would correct them for me. But if my estimate is anywhere
near right, it is not a proud record for a country which is nearly
100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on
cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And
if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let
us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than
going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books,
whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK REVIEWER

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette
ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten
dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his
typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He
cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is
already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered
letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for
two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the
bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be
entered in his address book. He has lost his address book, and the
thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything,
afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.

He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins
and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not
chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be
suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky
streak he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is
half-past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he
should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any
serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost
continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby,
the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy
boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most
recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which
brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in
red.

Needless to say this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a
novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all
literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a
book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky
parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a
note suggesting that they "ought to go well together". They arrived
four days ago, but for 48 hours the reviewer was prevented by moral
paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute moment
he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be
PALESTINE AT THE CROSS ROADS, SCIENTIFIC DAIRY FARMING, A SHORT
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY (this one is 680 pages and weighs
four pounds), TRIBAL CUSTOMS IN PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA, and a
novel, IT'S NICER LYING DOWN, probably included by mistake. His
review–800 words, say–has got to be "in" by midday
tomorrow.

Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so
ignorant that he will have to read at least 50 pages if he is to
avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the
author (who of course knows all about the habits of book
reviewers), but even to the general reader. By four in the
afternoon he will have taken the books out of their wrapping paper
but will still be suffering from a nervous inability to open them.
The prospect of having to read them, and even the smell of the
paper, affects him like the prospect of eating cold ground-rice
pudding flavoured with castor oil. And yet curiously enough his
copy will get to the office in time. Somehow it always does get
there in time. At about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively
clear, and until the small hours he will sit in a room which grows
colder and colder, while the cigarette smoke grows thicker and
thicker, skipping expertly through one book after another and
laying each down with the final comment, "God, what tripe!" In the
morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour
or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the
clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into
it. All the stale old phrases–"a book that no one should
miss", "something memorable on every page", "of special value are
the chapters dealing with, etc etc"–will jump into their
places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will
end up at exactly the right length and with just about three
minutes to go. Meanwhile another wad of ill-assorted, unappetising
books will have arrived by post. So it goes on. And yet with what
high hopes this down-trodden, nerve-racked creature started his
career, only a few years ago.

Do I seem to exaggerate? I ask any regular reviewer–anyone
who reviews, say, a minimum of 100 books a year–whether he
can deny in honesty that his habits and character are such as I
have described. Every writer, in any case, is rather that kind of
person, but the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a
quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It
not only involves praising trash–though it does involve that,
as I will show in a moment–but constantly INVENTING reactions
towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.
The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested
in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are
probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If
he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or
twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The
rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or
damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit
down the drain, half a pint at a time.

The great majority of reviews give an inadequate or misleading
account of the book that is dealt with. Since the war publishers
have been less able than before to twist the tails of literary
editors and evoke a paean of praise for every book that they
produce, but on the other hand the standard of reviewing has gone
down owing to lack of space and other inconveniences. Seeing the
results, people sometimes suggest that the solution lies in getting
book reviewing out of the hands of hacks. Books on specialised
subjects ought to be dealt with by experts, and on the other hand a
good deal of reviewing, especially of novels, might well be done by
amateurs. Nearly every book is capable of arousing passionate
feeling, if it is only a passionate dislike, in some or other
reader, whose ideas about it would surely be worth more than those
of a bored professional. But, unfortunately, as every editor knows,
that kind of thing is very difficult to organise. In practice the
editor always finds himself reverting to his team of
hacks–his "regulars", as he calls them.

None of this is remediable so long as it is taken for granted
that every book deserves to be reviewed. It is almost impossible to
mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great
majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional
relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority
of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only
objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless",
while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be
"This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write
about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to
read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of
guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind
of evaluation. But as soon as values are mentioned, standards
collapse. For if one says–and nearly every reviewer says this
kind of thing at least once a week–that KING LEAR is a good
play and THE FOUR JUST MEN is a good thriller, what meaning is
there in the word "good"?

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply
to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long
reviews–1,000 words is a bare minimum–to the few that
seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books
can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600
words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants
to write it. Normally he doesn't want to write it, and the week-in,
week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed
figure in a dressing-gown whom I described at the beginning of this
article. However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he
can look down on, and I must say, from experience of both trades,
that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who
cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at
eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is
expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.

DECLINE OF THE ENGLISH MURDER

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is
already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out
for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your
spectacles on your nose, and open the NEWS OF THE WORLD. Roast beef
and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet
pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown
tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing
sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is
well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful
circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one
examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of
pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in
its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made
into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers,
one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the
greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan
period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and
1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time
are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill
Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong,
and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts,
there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general
pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the
accused man was acquitted.

Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had
successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular
melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the
form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and
reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a
considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent
English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not
only because the violence of external events has made murder seem
unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be
changing. The principal CAUSE CÉLÈBRE of the war
years was the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, which has now been
written up in a popular booklet; the verbatim account of the trial
was published some time last year by Messrs. Jarrolds with an
introduction by Mr. Bechhofer Roberts. Before returning to this
pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a
sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to
define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they
say fretfully that "you never seem to get a good murder
nowadays".

In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by
excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself.
Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten
criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex
was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four
cases respectability–the desire to gain a secure position in
life, or not to forfeit one's social position by some scandal such
as a divorce–was one of the main reasons for committing
murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of
a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance
policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of
the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of
careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of
neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some
dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be
clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare
to make up, such as Crippen's flight across the Atlantic with his
mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing "Nearer, my God,
to Thee" on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in
the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill
Cream's, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were
either wife or husband of the murderer.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a
NEWS OF THE WORLD reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The
murderer should be a little man of the professional class–a
dentist or a solicitor, say–living an intensely respectable
life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached
house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds
through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local
Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong
Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a
guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival
professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of
murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having
decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning,
and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means
chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should
commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less
damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this
kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic
qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim
and murderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of
this atmosphere, and in three cases, including the one I referred
to but did not name, the story approximates to the one I have
outlined.

Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling
in it. It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed
that particular murder, and it was only by good luck that they did
not commit several others. The background was not domesticity, but
the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the
American film. The two culprits were an eighteen-year-old
ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an American army deserter,
posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They were only together
for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until they were
arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met
casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a
stolen army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist,
which was not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful
performance in this line); and declared that she wanted to do
something dangerous, "like being a gun-moll." Hulten described
himself as a big-time Chicago gangster, which was also untrue. They
met a girl bicycling along the road, and to show how tough he was
Hulten ran over her with his truck, after which the pair robbed her
of the few shillings that were on her. On another occasion they
knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift, took her coat
and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the most wanton
way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have £8 in
his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because
he had foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made
spontaneous confessions to the police. In court each prisoner
incriminated the other. In between crimes, both of them seem to
have behaved with the utmost callousness: they spent the dead
taxi-driver's £8 at the dog races.

Judging from her letters, the girl's case has a certain amount
of psychological interest, but this murder probably captured the
headlines because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and
the anxieties of the Battle of France. Jones and Hulten committed
their murder to the tune of V1, and were convicted to the tune of
V2. There was also considerable excitement because–as has
become usual in England–the man was sentenced to death and
the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr. Raymond, the reprieving
of Jones caused widespread indignation and streams of telegrams to
the Home Secretary: in her native town, "SHE SHOULD HANG" was
chalked on the walls beside pictures of a figure dangling from a
gallows. Considering that only ten women have been hanged in
Britain this century, and that the practice has gone out largely
because of popular feeling against it, it is difficult not to feel
that this clamour to hang an eighteen-year-old girl was due partly
to the brutalizing effects of war. Indeed, the whole meaningless
story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap
perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war
period.

Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder
of recent years should have been committed by an American and an
English girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is
difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as
the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society
where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes
as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.

HOW THE POOR DIE

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X,
in the fifteenth ARRONDISSEMENT of Paris. The clerks put me through
the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept
answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let
me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you
will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had
been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know
that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the
interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back
a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in
coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.

After the questioning came the bath–a compulsory routine
for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.
My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering
for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen
nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown–no
slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said–and led
out into the open air. This was a night in February and I was
suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to was 200 yards
away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital
grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel
path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt
round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a
strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in
pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low,
ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds
surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet
sweetish. As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small,
round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a
doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First
the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like
wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to
exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man's back or
chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some
moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something
called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical
text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of
those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I
watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain
amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the
student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a
word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been
sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no
more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much
impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me.
I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it
was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking
to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only
put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified
the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew
about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down
again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had
been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me
alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming,
the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot
bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and
they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while
some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers
began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I
learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a
favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied
for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you
don't happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes
the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the
second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is
buckled at the back and you can't get it off. This is the period
the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a
sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a
waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I
was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge
this was the only night of my life–I mean the only night
spent in bed–in which I have not slept at all, not even a
minute.

During my first hour in the Hôpital X I had had a whole
series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was
misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all,
either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and
instructive way. At five in the morning the nurses came round, woke
the patients and took their temperatures, but did not wash them. If
you were well enough you washed yourself, otherwise you depended on
the kindness of some walking patient. It was generally patients,
too, who carried the bed bottles and die grim bedpan, nicknamed LA
CASSEROLE. At eight breakfast arrived, called army-fashion LA
SOUPE. It was soup, too, a thin vegetable soup with slimy hunks of
bread floating about in it. Later in the day the tall, solemn,
black-bearded doctor made his rounds, with an INTERNE and a troop
of students following at his heels, but there were about sixty of
us in the ward and it was evident that he had other wards to attend
to as well. There were many beds past which he walked day after
day, sometimes followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if
you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize
themselves you got plenty of attention of a kind. I myself, with an
exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as
many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a
very queer feeling–queer, I mean, because of their intense
interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any
perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to
relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take
his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with
excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some
expensive piece of machinery. And then ear after ear–ears of
young men, of girls, of negroes–pressed against your back,
relays of fingers solemnly but clumsily tapping, and not from any
one of them did you get a word of conversation or a look direct in
your face. As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you
were primarily A SPECIMEN, a thing I did not resent but could never
quite get used to.

After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the
surrounding patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so
close together that you could easily touch your neighbour's hand,
had every sort of disease in it except, I suppose, acutely
infectious cases. My right-hand neighbour was a little red-haired
cobbler with one leg shorter than the other, who used to announce
the death of any other patient (this happened a number of times,
and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it) by whistling
to me, exclaiming "NUMÉRO 43!" (or whatever it was) and
flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with
him, but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some
squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed
that was foot to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn't
see him die–they moved him to another bed), a little weazened
man who was suffering from I do not know what disease, but
something that made his whole body so intensely sensitive that any
movement from side to side, sometimes even the weight of the
bedclothes, would make him shout out with pain. His worst suffering
was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest difficulty. A
nurse would bring him the bed bottle and then for a long time stand
beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with horses,
until at last with an agonized shriek of "Je fissel" he would get
started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had
seen being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all
hours. My left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man
who used periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and
astonishing quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of
his body. In the bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was
dying, a handsome old man with a white imperial, round whose bed,
at all hours when visiting was allowed, four elderly female
relatives dressed all in black sat exactly like crows, obviously
scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the bed opposite me in the
farther row was an old bald-headed man with drooping moustaches and
greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering from some disease
that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass receptacle
stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter came to
visit him. At sight of them the old man's bloated face lit up with
a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl
of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly
working its way from under the bedclothes. I seemed to see in
advance the gesture that was coming–the girl kneeling beside
the bed, the old man's hand laid on her head in his dying blessing.
But no, he merely handed her the bed bottle, which she promptly
took from him and emptied into the receptacle.

About a dozen beds away from me was Numéro 57–I
think that was his number–a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case.
Everyone in the ward knew him by sight because he was sometimes the
subject of a medical lecture. On two afternoons a week the tall,
grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a party of students, and
on more than one occasion old NUMÉRO 57 was wheeled in on a
sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the doctor would
roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge flabby
protruberance on the man's belly–the diseased liver, I
suppose–and explain solemnly that this was a disease
attributable to alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking
countries. As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a
smile, a nod or any kind of recognition. While he talked, very
grave and upright, he would hold the wasted body beneath his two
hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to and fro, in just the
attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not that NUMÉRO
57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old hospital
inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since marked
down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly uninterested
in what was said about him, he would lie with his colourless eyes
gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like a piece of
antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly shrunken.
His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no
bigger than a doll's.

One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my
pillow before the nurses arrived. "NUMÉRO 57!"–he
flung his arms above his head. There was a light in the ward,
enough to see by. I could see old NUMÉRO 57 lying crumpled
up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of the bed, and
towards me. He had died some rime during the night, nobody knew
when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death
indifferently and went about their work. After a long time, an hour
or more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a
great clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets,
but it was not removed till some time later. Meanwhile, in the
better light, I had had time for a good look at NUMÉRO 57.
Indeed I lay on my side to look at him. Curiously enough he was the
first dead European I had seen. I had seen dead men before, but
always Asiatics and usually people who had died violent deaths.
NUMÉRO 57's eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his
small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most
impressed me, however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been
pale before, but now it was little darker than die sheets. As I
gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this
disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on
a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of "natural" death,
one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then,
I thought, that's what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty
years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to
be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive
by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then,
that it's better to die violently and not too old. People talk
about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that
even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? "Natural"
death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and
painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it
in your own home and not in a public institution. This poor old
wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even
important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was
merely a number, then a "subject" for the students' scalpels. And
the sordid publicity of dying in such a p